


t£ Mould of Doctrine, 



A Study of 

.0MANS,VI.1Z 



JES vSE B, THOMAS, D.D. 






■V^fe'>.^ft/^. 


















LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

■\2\k\l 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 



A STUDY OF 



ROMANS YI. 17, 



AS BEARING ON THE MEANING AND VALUE OF THE SPECIFIC 
FORM OF BAPTISM, AS APPOINTED BY OUR LORD. 




JESSE B. THOMAS, D. D., 

Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Pierrepont St., Brooklyn, N. Y. 




PHILADELPHIA : 
AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 

1420 CHESTNUT STREET. 



'^nJ^ 



w 



,r^ 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by the 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



REPRINTED FROM THE " EXAMINER." 



I 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

The Baptists and the Bible 5 

Fidelity or Stubbornness— Which ? 8— The 
Charge of Ritualism, 12 — The Specific Case 
Considered, 13 — The Question of Catholicity, 
17_The War About a Word, 21. 

CHAPTER II. 

Baptism the Mould of Doctrine 23 

A Tendency to Guard Against, 24 — What the 
'' Mould " Signifies, 27 — How Theories Some- 
times Grow, 30 — A Curious Hypothesis, 33 — 
Applying the Survival Theory, 34. 

CHAPTER III. 

Baptism, the Resurrection, and Historic Chris- 
tianity 40 

Things to be Explained, 43 — Baptism and the 
Resurrection, 46 — Baptism a Historic Witness, 
49. 

CHAPTER lY. 

Baptism and the New Birth. — Modern Theories 57 
The First Great Question, Does Baptism Re- 
generate ? 57 — The Second Great Question, 
Does Baptism Symbolize Regeneration? 69. 

CHAPTER y. 

Baptism and the New Birth. — The Apostolic 

Idea 73 

Analogy of Roman to Jewish Beliefs, 76 — Paul 
Against these Beliefs, 78 — The Central Truth 
of Christianity, 82 — Baptism Not a Purifica- 
tion, 85. 

3 



4 CONTENTS, 

CHAPTER YI. 

Baptism and the New Birth — Perversions and 

THEIR Sources 90 

The Symbolism of the Ordinances, 91 — What 
Does Infant Baptism Mean ? 94 — How Sprink- 
ling is Defended, 98 — An Enormous Contradic- 
tion, 101 — How Infant Baptism Arose, 104. 

CHAPTER YII. 

Baptism and the New Birth — Results of Per- 
version 101 

Unitarianism and its Origin, 113 — ^Luther's 
Great Inconsistency, 115 — Spiritual Baptism 
and the New Birth, 119 — Evolution Fallacies 
Anticipated, 122. 

CHAPTER YIII. 

Baptism and Loyalty — The Historic Idea 127 

Luther's Prophecy Historically Realized, 132 — 
Freedom, Civil and Intellectual, Demanded, 135 
— The Anabaptists and this Demand, 139 — Re- 
formers of the Reformation, 141 . 

CHAPTER IX. 

Baptism and Loyalty — Debasing the Standards 147 
A Remnant of Rome, 151 — First, The Revision 
of Formularies, 153 — Second, The Warping of 
Interpretation, 158 — Some Illustrative In- 
stances, 160. 

CHAPTER X 

Baptism and Loyalty — The Ultimate Issue 168 

First, The Parable of the Disobedient Son, 
171 — Second, The Parable of the Rebellious 
Tenants, 175— Third, The Parable of the Con- 
temptuous Servants, 176 — Baptism the Test of 
Loyalty, 181 — A Linguistic Agnosticism, 182 
—The Witnessing Word, 188. 



The Mould of Doctrine. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE BAPTISTS AND THE BIBLE. 

IN the Autobiography of Dr. layman Beecher 
(vol. ii., p. 87), in a letter addressed by him 
to his son Edward, then preparing for the Con- 
gregational ministry, occurs this curious passage : 
^' There is only one thing which you will have 
to watch and pray against; that is the morbid 
sensibility of what may be termed a nervous 
conscience ; by which I mean a conscience made 
pretematurally sensitive and fearful. This I 
have reason to believe has worried many a 
man till he became a Baptist through excess of 
conscience.'^ So wholesome a recoil did this 
paternal caution produce from "excess of con- 
science/' that not only did the young student 
abandon his growing Baptist predilections, but 
no one of Dr. Beecher's household has ever 
since been driven thus by conscience into the 
Baptist ranks. 

The notion here insinuated, that Baptist eon- 

5 



6 THE MOULD OF DOCTUIJS'E, 

sclentlousness is at bottom only scrupulosity, 
highly flavored with obstinacy, is not unusual, 
and perhaps under all the circumstances not un- 
natural, in the casual observer. The skillful 
partisan knows how to seize an apt point of cir- 
cumstance, to present an imposing front by mar- 
shalling; his meao;re facts into a battle-line lono; 
though thin, and so to win by impression rather 
than by measuring weapons. In the court of 
prejudice the brilliancy of the indictment is 
accepted as conclusive of the facts, and judicial 
inquiry is dispensed with. 

Such an opportunity has been afforded, and 
abundantly improved, in the recent dealings 
between the Baptists and the American Bible 
Society. Consider how formidable a case may 
be made by the bare statement of a few facts, 
with plausible inferences therefrom, viz.: 

1. The real question at issue is the translation 
of a single word, and that in a single sense — 
the Bible Society being willing to translate the 
Greek word by a "generic'^ term, or to transfer 
it untranslated. — Did ever ^^jot and tittle'^ breed 
so great a controversy before? 

2. Because the Society will not concede this 
point, the Baptists alone of all the co-operating 
denominations withdraw. — What a wanton 
breach of the " Unity of Christendom,^^ because 



THE MOULD OF DOCTBINE. 7 

an unsectarian Society will not violate its organic 
and fundamental principle ! 

About these two main positions now deploy 
a skirmish line of supplementary suggestions, 
such as: 

3. The Baptists cling tenaciously to immersion 
as the only baptism. — How absurd to obstruct 
the coming reign of ^^sw^eetness and light ^^ by 
thus superstitiously exalting the "letter^' above 
the ^^ spirit'^ of the ordinance! 

4. The Baptists stand almost alone ^^ against 
the Western world ^^ in this. — How presump- 
tuous in them to condemn the ancient church 
by rejecting infant baptism! How arrogant to 
reflect upon the present church by their 
^^ close communion" doctrine! 

5. The Baptists, a^ known in history, have 
somehow been pretty uniformly "in the oppo- 
sition." — This seems to suggest some inherent 
waywardness of temper, or obliquity of doctrine, 
tending to the theory that the only way to 
"please God" is to be "contrary to all men." 

Probably the above counts would be regarded 
by the most rancid anti-Baptist as sufficiently 
vigorous and comprehensive to present the case 
in its strongest features, (and perhaps in his 
judgment to close it in the opening.) But patient 
examination will often show how a statement 



8 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

even of undeniable facts may, by an omission, a 
misconstruction, or the suggestion of a mis- 
leading inference, tend to a conclusion specious, 
but utterly false. 

Let us begin then with the last of the charges, 
which being at that end of the case naturally 
carries the sting, is most venomous, and first felt. 

FIDELITY OR ST dBBORNNESS — WHICH? 

Some recent New England monographs upon 
the early Baptists of that realm seem devoted to 
the establishment concerning them of Elihu's 
thesis against Job^ "What man is like Job, who 
drinketh up scorning as water? ^^ Now if supe- 
rior success in getting before magistrates, behind 
prison bars, into the pillory, or out of the com- 
monwealth, fairly demonstrates a craving for 
misery and hate, then some of our forefathers 
seem to have had a really cavernous appetite for 
that kind of luxury, and no stinted supply. And 
by the same rule so did the early martyrs. But 
before concluding so uncharitably, in either case, 
it is well to consider the reasonableness of their 
own explanation ; that the suffering was endured 
rather than coveted, as a logical necessity of 
fidelity to a doctrine precious above life to them, 
but sought to be exterminated by others. 

But how can fidelity concerning a mere iso- 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 9 

lated rite create any logical necessity in realms 
of conduct and controversy so wide and so 
distant? Because this necessity is not at once 
obvious, its existence has been too often ignored 
or denied, and loyalty to principle has been 
mocked as stubbornness of self-will. 

^^It is the singular and distinguished honor of 
the Baptists/^ says Herbert Skeats, in his History 
of the Free Churches of England^ ^^to have repu- 
diated, from their earliest history, all coercive 
power over the consciences and the actions of 
men with reference to religion. No sentence is 
to be found in all their writings inconsistent with 
those principles of Christian liberty and willing- 
hood w^hich are now equally dear to all the free 
Congregational Churches of England. They 
were the proto-evangelists of the voluntary prin- 
ciple,^^ Mr. Skeats adds in a note, that he is 
not himself a Baptist. This adds value to his 
testimony as impartial, but it suggests also a 
further and pertinent thought. One would 
suppose that so unique and persistent a coinci- 
dence, of peculiar doctrinal tenets and allegiance 
to a peculiar principle, would have hinted some 
possible causal relation between the two. But 
he appears to have no suspicion, even, that the 
alliance is more than accidental. In like manner 

^ London edition, 1869, p. 24. 



10 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

Gervinus, in his Introduction to the History of the 
Nineteenth Century^ writing of the Anabaptists, 
couples together their "refusal to baptize infants" 
by State command, and their "return to the fun- 
damental maxims of liberty and equality for 
Avhich men were redeemed by Christ/^ "antici- 
pating principles which could only be established 
in later times" — but he does not recognize any 
mutual dependence of the two ideas. Bogue 
and Bennett, in their History of Dissenters^'^ 
notice it as a '^ singular fact that Baptists have 
universally been independents, when in the nature 
of things there might have been Episcopal or Pres- 
byterian Baptists^' Even within a few months 
the New York Independent asked editorially, in 
a puzzled way, w^hy the rejection of infant bap- 
tism and of sprinkling should so uniformly have 
clung together. 

Since men act from motives, and motives arise 
out of beliefs, it is but just and charitable first 
to seek an explanation of conduct in some cog- 
ency of conviction ; and only when that resource 
fails to attribute it to caprice or some baser 
motive. 

Reverting now to the suggestion that the great 
body of Christendom are united against the Bap- 

1 London, 1866, pp. 29, 30. 

2 London, 1808, vol. L, p. 142. 



TUE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 11 

tists as to their peculiar views^ it is enough to cite 
in response Bishop Jewell's words in his aj3ology^ ^ 
"Unity is not a sign of truth. There was per- 
fect unity among the Israelites when they wor- 
shipped the golden calf/' " The old Arians called 
themselves Catholio, and stigmatized the Ortho- 
dox as Ambrosians and Athanasians/' If ma- 
jorities alone establish "catholicity/' then is 
Rome really more catholic than Protestantism, 
and Paganism more so than all of us together. 
If divergence from the majority, either in the 
past or the present, seems to savor of presump- 
tion or arrogance, it is still the inevitable penalty 
of trying to do right. Luther sometimes felt 
the seeming rashness of the attitude he and his 
comrades had assumed toward "the Pope and 
the Doctors, and the whole body of the Church," 
while, as he quaintly said, "there is not wit 
enough among us to cure a spavined horse." 
But he did not flinch, and the Keformation be- 
came secure. If an honest effort to improve 
upon the decayed or perverted habits of the 
community be a reflection upon one's neighbor, 
who can measure the arrogance of a man who 
buys a new hat before his neighbors are supplied. 
"Master, saying this, thou reproachest us also," 

* Cited in Hunt's History of Religious TJiought in 
England (London, 1870), p. 44. 



12 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

said the lawyer to our Lord^ as though such a 
consequence must lead him to review or with- 
draw his words. But the words stand. 

THE CHAEGE OF EITUALISM. 

Turning the wheel one notch further back, 
we come to the third charge against the Baptists 
as specified above — the familiar charge, (so *^ fa- 
miliar'^ indeed as to have bred ^^ contempt/') 
that they value form above essence, and so be- 
come mere ritualists. The freedom of dealing 
with the ordinance by others is applauded by 
way of contrast, as exalting the ^^ spirit'' above 
the ^4etter." Probably those who follow this 
line of suo:o:estion do not see that thev are ad- 
vocating the entire abolition, and not the modi- 
fication, of the external ordinances. Was the 
Apostle in contrasting the terms "letter" and 
"spirit" contending for literal circumcision on a 
reduced scale? Colerido-e, criticizino; Jeremv 
Taylor's discussion in this line, says ^ " his only 
plausible arguments apply equally to the Pedo- 
baptists and the Baptists, and prove the Quakers 
right if anybody." But Xeander^ tells us that 
George Fox, the chief interpreter of the Quak- 
ers, went further, and argued the subordination 

1 Worlcs (N. Y., 1853), vol., Aidsto Ref., p. 336. 
^History of Christian Dogmas (Bolin, 1858), vol. II., 
p. 633. 



THE MOULD OF DOGTBINE, 13 

of all the "letter" of Scripture to the "inward 
light/^ on the same grounds that the Catholics 
subject it to the authority of the "Church/^ and 
Meier and his followers to that of "reason." 
Socinus^ too, the early herald of Unitarianism, 
denied the permanence of water baptism, re- 
garding its early observance a concession to the 
carnalism of Jews and heathen. Along this 
same drift went Ralph Waldo Emerson, trans- 
cendentalizing the Scripture, and breaking finally 
from the Unitarians, because he would not par- 
ticipate in the superstitious prolongation of a 
"mere form" in the Lord's Supper. 

A command to do a particular thing is not 
obeyed by doing some other thing, however 
similar. And as its issuance implies wisdom 
and authority, to attempt to improve upon it is 
to assume superior wisdom, and to release from 
it is to arrogate superior authority. The Bap- 
tists are simply guilty of refusing to do either. 

THE SPECIFIC CASE CONSIDERED. 

But to consider the more specific case in hand, 
as set forth in the second of the above com- 
plaints. Baptists, it is alleged, having entered 
with others into a "catholic" and " unsectarian " 
organization, sought to induce its managers to 
violate the original agreement between the par- 



14 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

ties^ and prostitute the institution to a sectarian 
end, and failing in this, they have broken up 
the unity of American Christians in Bible work. 
The managers of the Bible Society in the leading 
article of their official paper, The Record (for 
June 15, 1882), which was intended to be a kind 
of irenicon to the Baptists, have not been able by 
a most courteous and dexterous statement of the 
case to avoid the virtual renewal of this heavy 
charge. They say " the Society was formed in 
1816 with one specific object," which the mana- 
gers have since aimed to carry out " in a manner 
entirely free from sectarianism and partisanship.'' 
In illustration of this they add, that the Society 
'^ has never printed or cii'culated the Douay Bible 
or the Rhemish Testament, or appropriated funds 
for this purpose ; " that " it is a priuGiple of the 
Society to circulate no versions except those 
which are made from the original Greek and 
Hebrew, and this rule excludes from its list certain 
versions in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and 
Italian, translated from the Vulgate,-^ 

Referring to the request of the Missionary 
Union for funds to publish ^^two versions of the 
Bible which have been long in use in Burmah,^^ 
one of them "loell known as Dr, Judson^s version, 
the early editions of which liad been jrrinted at the 
Society^ s expense,^^ the other " Dr. Mason's Karen 



lEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 15 

Bible/^ they add that having been examined ^4n 
regard to their oatholieity and the fidelity of their 
translationy^ they were found ''defixiient in the 
quality of catholicity, and therefore could not be 
properly recommended for adoption,''^ This lack 
of catholicity, they explain, is evidenced by the 
fact that some of those using Dr. Judson^s ver- 
sion do so " under protest, being constrained, for 
conscience sake, in the public reading of Scrip- 
ture to substitute other words for those selected 
by Dr. Judson to indicate the rite of baptism.'' 
They further remind the public, that ^^as long 
ago as 1836'' they offered ^-$5,000 to those who 
were then interested in Dr. Judson's work, to 
promote the circulation of any versions which 
all the denominations represented in the Society 
could consistently use and circulate in their several 
schools and communities, and the offer was de- 
clined." The article in question is entitled 
^^Limitations," and its whole aim is to show, 
as above indicated, that the Baptists have 
ignorantly or craftily attempted to betray the 
Managers into trangressing the Society's or- 
ganic ^limitations," and this being refused, have 
unreasonably, if not dishonorably, revolted. 

But before accepting this as a new illustration 
that the Baptists are like porpoises, with their 
heads always instinctively to the wind, let us ask 



Ifi THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

whether, in this as in many other cases, it may 
not be the wind that has changed instead of the 
porpoises. 

What, then, was the "specific object ^^ for 
w^hich the Bible Society was established? As 
stated in its own documents, it was the circula- 
tion^ of "received versions where they exist,^^ 
and the "most faithful translations^^ where there 
are no received versions. Under that original 
compact they recognize to this day their obliga- 
tion to print only King James' English version, 
without inquiring into its "catholicity,^' or the 
superior " faithfulness '' of later revisions. Their 
"limitations'' as rigidly still bind them to spread 
that as to reject others. Under the plain letter 
of their mutual contract (to which the Roman 
Catholics were not a party , either), they published, 
at least up to 1840, Roman Catholic translations 
of the Vulgate. A report in their minutes of 
that year, referring to this fact, says: ^"In for- 
eign countries we were to publish 4n received 
versions where they exist, and in the most faith- 
ful translations where they do not.' These ^re- 
ceived versions' alluded to were no doubt the 
French y Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, 
Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, etc., as old or older 

^ A. B. Society Report, 1840. 
2 lb., pp. 33, 34. 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 17 

than the English, and which the Society could 
not expect to alter.'^ Now in this group are the 
very versions mentioned by the Managers in 1882 
as excluded from their list by a ^^ principle of the 
Society/^ to '' circulate no versions '^ made '' from 
the Vulgate/' but only those '' made from the 
original Greek and Hebrew.'^ When and how 
this ^'principle'' came in does not appear. 

THE QUESTION OF ^^CATHOLICITY/' 

If their being ^^ received versions'' be denied 
or ignored, and the question turn on their being 
'' faithful and catholic translations," it may well 
be answered: 1. That they fully meet the So- 
ciety's standard of catholicity, their only test 
being the treatment of the word for baptism; 
2. That if translations based on the Vulgate be 
presumably inferior — ^the stream being less pure 
than the fountain— ^those based on the English 
must be still worse, as coming from still lower 
in the stream — the English itself being derived 
chiefly through the Vulgate from the Greek. ^ 

Whether under its obligation to print ^^ re- 
ceived versions" or ^4aithful translations" does 
not appear, but under one head or the other the 
Society did print Dr. Judson's version at the 

^ See Eadie History English Bible (London, 1876), 
vol. I., p. 402 ; vol. II., pp. 70, 191, et passim. 

B 



18 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

first. If it was the "received version'^ then, it 
is now; for there is no other. If it was a 
"faithful translation^^ then, it is now; for it has 
not changed. If the original compact ever 
required its publication under either head, it 
does now; for it is a first principle of equity 
that no compact once entered upon can be 
changed, or new terms added, except by aom- 
mon consent. And four partners can no more 
do this as against one, than one as against four. 

But the Managers of the Bible Society have 
not only violated the rights of their copartners 
by the forcible insertion of the words "and 
catholic" in the original compact, but have gone 
on to define that word in a sense most invidious 
and exclusive, and so most contradictory. If an 
unsectarian be a comprehensive and a sectarian a 
divisive spirit, then has the Bible Society chosen 
for itself a most sectarian attitude. 

It was scarcely worthy of a scholar like Dean 
Trench, in his work on Bible Revision^ to 
suggest that the "so-called Baptists" could not 
be invited to co-operate, "seeing that they de- 
mand, not a translation of the Scripture, but an 
interpretation, and that in their own sense." It 
is no more worthy of a great Christian organiza- 
tion like the American Bible Society to brand as 

1 New York, 1858, p. 179. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 19 

non-catholic a version of the Scripture^ which in 
its rendering of the particular word criticized 
follows exactly in the footsteps of ^' all the im- 
portant ancient Oriental versions/^ made bjfore 
our modern sects came into being. Was the 
ancient Syriac made by a Baptist for partisan 
ends? Was Ulfilas a sectarian^ or Luther^ or 
Henry Marty n^ whose Persian Bible this Society 
has probably circulated? But in all these trans- 
lations the word is ^^ immerse/^ or its equivalent.^ 
But the question of catholicity^ we are re- 
minded, is in this case a practical one. The 
Society comprises various denominations, and it 
must circulate no versions save those which all 
alike can ^^consistently use and circulate.'' But 
what can they ^^considently^^ use and circulate? 
Since all versions are still to be conformed ^^to 
the principles upon which the American Bible 
Society was originally founded/^ it is fair to 
interpret the word in the light of those prin- 
ciples as then announced and acted on. It 
appears, then, that in 1816 the Society thought 
it ^^ consistent " for all parties to ^^use and cir- 
culate" versions rendering baptize "immerse"; 
for they promised to circulate and did circulate 

^ Cf. Bosworth, Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Versions 
(London, 1874). 



20 TEE MOULD OF BOCTRIl^E, 

such versions then and for a long time after.^ 
By what rule do the ^Managers decide that it is 
inconsistent for a High Churchman or a Broad 
Churchman to use such a version^ Avhen these do 
not for a moment dispute the meaning of the 
Avord^ but rest theu^ divergent practice solely on 
the authority, the one of the Church, the other, 
with Dean Stanley, of the Zeitgeist, According 
to the scholarship of Bishop Titcomb's own 
Church, it is just a^ easy to prove that ^^ im- 
merse ^^ means ^^ sprinkle'' as that ''Baptizo^^ 
does, and he need not be more '' embarrassed '' 
by the one than by the other. 

But he ^6' embarrassed by the ^^ public reading" 
of o]ie word and the public doing of another and 
different thing ^ and ^^consistency'' must be re- 
stored by conforming the word translated to ike 
thing done. At this writing, therefore, transla- 
tors must, in order to reach the ^^ catholicity'^ 
required by the American Bible Society, subject 
their work to three successive processes of refine- 
ment: 1. Staii: w-ith Greek and Hebrew text; 2. 
Correct by the English vei-sion; 3. Modify so as 
not to conflict vaih current customs. It was the 
Romanist, Albert Pighius, who said the Scrip- 
tures are like "a nose of wax which may be 
twisted every way." They are certainly never 

^See Bible Society's Record, June 15, 1882. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 21 

more pliable than when fluent in the process of 

translation. 

THE WAR ABOUT A W^ORD. 

But as something more is hereafter to be said 
on this particular theme^ it is well to pass on to 
the only remaining point — the supposed folly of 
war about a word. It is quite open to some of 
our good-natured critics to urge that the English 
title, '^ Particular Baptists ^^ be now relinquished 
to the Americans in memory of this controversy. 
But it will be remembered that it was the Board 
and not the Baptists who first struck at the word. 
It had been left untranslated, or rendered by 
divers terms colorless or misleading, as the Bap- 
tists believed, without revolt by them. They 
asked for themselves only what they conceded to 
others, a charitable reciprocity of judgment and 
dealing. But this was decided not to be " catho- 
lic.^^ And they "were made offenders for a 
word." 

This event will have served a good purpose, 
however, if it compels renewed attention to some 
questions involved in or cognate to the matter of 
Scripture translation. Whether the Scripture 
shall be translated at all is no longer a question, 
at least among Protestants ; but it was once hotly 
contested, and great epochs of religious history 



22 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

grew out of the contest. "Whether it shall all be 
translated, and if not, what and how many words 
shall still be kept in the original shadow — ^this, 
though seemingly a smaller question, has also had 
its not insignificant place among the problems of 
the past. The inevitable narrowing of the issue 
here and now to a single word may well set us 
inquiring also as to whether that word, and the 
rite it describes, have had their due consideration 
as formative and conservative forces in Christian 
history, and whether they are worth contending 
for. 

A sentence of the apostle Paul is eminently 
suggestive in this connection, occurring in Romans 
6: 17. In the New Revision it reads, ^^Ye 
became obedient from the heart to that form 
(margin ^^ pattern^') of teaching whereunto ye 
were delivered.'^ It is noticeable that, in fidelity 
to the original, the marginal rendering in the 
common version is the exclusive form in the New. 
If the '^ mould of doctrine^^ here alluded to be, as 
will here be maintained, the ordinance of baptism, 
then the significance of the present issue will be 
manifest. For, in that case, he who breaks the 
mould imperils the doctrine. 



CHAPTER II. 

BAPTISM THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

TWO master sayings from great men will be 
found pertinent in current religious discus- 
sion. The one is from Lord Bacon's Essay on 
Superstition^ viz. : " There is a superstition in 
avoiding superstition, when men think to do best 
if they go farthest from the superstition formerly 
received; therefore care should be had that the 
good be not taken away with the bad.'' The 
other is from Bishop Butler in his Analogy of 
Religion,^ viz.: "As it is one of the peculiar 
weaknesses of human nature when, upon a com- 
parison of two things, one is found to be of 
greater importance than the other, to consider 
this other as of scarcely any importance at all ; 
it is highly necessary that we remind ourselves 
how great presumption it is in us to make light 
of any institutions of divine appointment." 

^ Whately's Annotated Bacon (Boston, 1863), p. 176. 
2 (London, 1852), Pt. II., ch. 1, p. 209. 



24 THE MOULD OF DOCTBINE, 

A TENDENCY TO GUARD AGAINST. 

The reactionary tendency to an irrational ex- 
treme is perceptible in much that has lately been 
said in disparagement of ^institutional religion/^ 
Luther found people in his day who thought the 
greater part of Protestantism consisted in show- 
ing their contempt for Rome by eating meat on 
Friday. There are some who measure their 
spirituality to-day by the magnificence of their 
contempt for all religious forms. Now it is to be 
hoped that the essence of neither Protestantism 
nor spirituality consists in stupidity; and if not, 
it will be worth while to notice that the really 
contemptible thing in Christian history has been, 
not the introduction of forms, which was divine; 
but their unauthorized multiplication, and per- 
version to base ends, which was wholly human. 
Let the parasites suffer, and not the tree they 
have infested. Because baptism, for instance, 
was once wrongly counted necessary to salvation, 
we need not now, as though "reverse of wrong 
were right,^^ conclude that it is in every sense 
unnecessary. Because, like its Divine Origi- 
nator, it has been disfigured and loaded with 
tawdry mockeries, we are not bound to crucify 
it between two thieves. 

Bishop Butler's caution as to over-disparage- 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 25 

nient by contrast reminds us likewise of the 
frequent suggestion that baptism, being less 
important than other things, is really unimpor- 
tant. Here the illicit expansion of the partial 
into an universal conclusion seems to arise from 
a lurking fallacy in tlie statement of the case. 
For unless it be less important in every sense 
than all other things, it cannot be unimportant. 
To say, for instance, that baptism is of less 
consequence than faith, because it does not save, 
is like saying that brains are of less account than 
breath, because life does not come through them. 
Breath and brains are not rivals, but alike 
essential in their respective spheres — ^the one that 
life may exist, the other that it may report itself. 
Comparing baptism with Christ's only other 
ordinance, it is indeed ^^difficult,'' as Dean Stan- 
ley remarks, ^^to see what is the d'JFerence in 
principle in the Roman Church which has ren- 
dered the practice with regard to one sacrament 
so exceedingly lax, with regard to the other so 
exceedingly rigid "^ and the observation need 
not be confined to Rome. 

However superciliously treated by men, the 
New Testament unquestionably gives baptism a 
preeminent place. In the order of time it is 

^Article on ''Baptism,'' Nineteenth Century Maga- 
zine, VI., p. 704. 



26 THE MOULD OF DOGTBIXE. 

first. The two great transitional epochs of the 
early world^ when Noah went through the flood, 
and Israel through the Red Sea, beginning the 
world's life anew, are specialized as the true 
prototypes of baptism.^ Through it our Lord 
was ^^ manifested '' and found entrance to his pub- 
lie ministry.^ Through it Christianity became 
visible on the day of Pentecost, and the external 
church began to be. ^ 

IS^ot less significant is its primary place in the 
order of symbolism ; for according to Archbishop 
Whately it ^^ denotes spiritual birth'' as the 
Lord's Supper does ^Hhe continual support of 
the Christian life."^ 

But a still deeper primacy of significance is 
attributed to this sacred ordinance in the title 
given it by the apostle Paul, and which has 
suggested these articles. Bishop Wordsworth 
renders the verse in question (Rom. 6 : 17) as 
follows: ^^You readily obeyed the mould of 
Christian faith and practice into which ai your 
baptism you were poured, as it were, like soft, 
ductile, and fluent metal, in order to be cast and 

11 Peter 3: 21. 1 Cor. 10: 2. 

2 John 1 : 31. 

3 Acts 2 : 38. 

^ Corruptzons of Christianity (N. Y., 1880), p. 109. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 2T 

take its form.'^ ^ Adding that the metaphor 
suggests itself to the apostle naturally in Corinth, 
where he was writing — a city famous for its 
castings in bronze. Conybeare and Howson^ 
translate the closing words of the verse ^liter- 
ally '^ as ^Hhe mould of teaching into which you 
are transmitted/^ In a note they remark of the 
context : 

St. Paul's view of the Christian life, throughout the 
sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters, is that it consists of 
a death and a resurrection ; the new-made Christian dies 
to sin, to the world, to the flesh and to the law ; this 
death he undergoes at his first entrance into communion 
with Christ, and it is hoth typified and realized when he 
is buried beneath the baptismal waters. But no sooner 
is he thus dead with Christ than he rises with him ; he 
is made partaker of Christ's resurrection ; he is united 
to Christ's body ; he lives in Christ, and to Christ ; he 
is no longer in the flesh, but in the spirit. 

SIGNIFIES. 

The authority of these leaders of the English 
Church, so eminent for learning and candor, 
will be assumed as sufficient to justify at least 
the preliminary assumption that the apostle in 
this verse refers to baptism as the "mould of 

1 Commentary on Neiv Testament (London, 1877). 
p. 232. 

'^ Life and Epistles of Paul (New York, 18G9), 
vol. II., p. 170. 



28 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

doctrine/^ The word here rendered mould 
(tupos) carries three shades of significance, as is 
recognized in our authorized version of the New 
Testament, viz. : 

1. HistoriG. The mould has itself been cast, 
and records unerringly the features of the matrix 
that formed it. Thus the unbelieving disciple 
demanded to see not simply marks {stigmata) in 
the hands of the Crucified, but the unmistakable 
Ifyrint (tupos) of the nails. 

2. Symbolic. The mould bears a distinct out- 
line which has a meaning; always the same out- 
line, and hence always the same meaning. The 
correspondence here is not of fact and fact, but 
of fact and idea. In this sense Adam was the 
''figure (tupos) of him who is to come.^^ 

3. Formative. The mould fixes its character- 
istic outlines upon all its fabrics, so that their 
genuineness is proved by their being exact re- 
productions of itself. So Moses was to make all 
things "according to the pattern (tupos) shown 
him in the mount.^^ 

The constant idea throughout is that of per- 
manent and verifiable coincidence of outline 
between counterparts. But to break a single 
line of the mould is to destroy this coincidence. 
It no longer faithfully records its origin, its 
device is blurred, and all its products marred. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 29 

Precisely this significance the apostle here attri- 
butes to the baptismal mould. 

1. Historically, It is the memorial of the 
dominant fact of Christianity — Our Lord's 
Resurrection from the dead. It bears the 
" print ^^ of that event as unmistakably as his 
hands did the outline of the nails. ^'Lihe as 
Christ/^ says the apostle in verse 4, "so we.^^ 

2. Symbolically. It is the palpable "figm-e'^ 
of the dominant idea of Christianity — the Neio 
Birth, This indisputable emblematic force of 
baptism forms the crisis and justification of his 
whole argument. "Are ye ignorant ^^ of this, 
asks the apostle, in verse 3, as though such 
obtuseness were incredible. 

3. Formatively, It is the faithful exponent 
and enforcer of the dominant principle of Chris- 
tianity — the surrender of the whole man through 
faith, " Ye became obedient from the heart," he 
says, therefore "your members'^ are all included. 
The "yielding up" in baptism is the "pattern" 
of the whole subsequent life. 

The Epistle to the Romans is indisputably the 
great doctrinal Epistle of the New Testament. 
That Epistle is but an elaboration of these three 
elements of doctrine. They appear at once in 
the introduction (ch. 1 : 1-7), viz. : the resurrection 
of Christ, as the "declaration" of his Sonship; 



so THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

saintship (i. e,^ separatedness to a new life) as 
the characteristic of discipleship ; and "obedi- 
ence of faith ^^ as the shaping force in Christian 
character. But all these again^ in distinct though 
germinal outline, are enclosed in the single rite of 
baptism. If it seems absurd to us that so great 
issues can lie hid in so insignificant a thing as a 
^'mere rite/" let us remember that he who out of 
infinite possibilities selected that single form, is 
the same who has chosen the acorn to hold un- 
counted forests, and — a significant parallel — 
biith to hold all the marvels and still unexplored 
mysteries of life. Recent philosophic and his- 
toric discussions remind us how little danger of 
exaggeration there is in attributing so tremen- 
dous a force to symbolism. ^^Men are guided 
by tj-pe, and " not by argument,^' says Dr. New- 
man. "Every idea vividly before ks/^ says Bage- 
hot, "soon appears to be true, unless we keep up 
our perceptions of the arguments which prove it 
untrue, and voluntarily coerce our minds to re- 
member its falsehood.^' 

HOW THEOEIES SOMETIMES GROW. 

The Puritans maintained, says Hardwick in 
his History of the Thirty-Nine Articles^ "with 
as much sagacity' as malice,^^ that "the right 

iBohn's Edition (London, 1876), p. 206. ' 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 31 

government of the Church cannot be separated 
from the dodrineJ^ It is significant that their 
quarrel with the English Churchy Luther^s with 
Rome^ and nearly all the controversies in the 
Churchy have grown out of the questions per- 
taining to the external, which were seen to 
involve inevitably the internal also. Archbishop 
Whately^s Essay on the Corruptions of Rome 
Traced to their Origin in Human Nature is a 
book well worthy of careful study, and bearing 
directly on the present theme. He there says/ 
^' It is a mistake, and a very common and practi- 
cally not unimportant one, to conclude that the 
origin of each tenet or practice is to be found in 
those arguments or texts which are urged in 
support of it; that they furnish the cause, on 
the removal of which the effects will cease of 
course; and that when once those reasonings are 
exploded, and those texts rightly explained, all 
danger is at an end of falling into similar errors. 
The fact is, that in a great number of instances, 
and by no means exclusively in questions con- 
nected with religion, the erroneous belief or prac- 
tice has arisen first, and the theory has been devised 
afterwards for its support J^ Dr. Newman^s book 
on the Development of the Doctrine in the Church 

^ Cited in Annotations on Bacon, p. 183. 



32 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

of Rome ^ is a precise illustration of this state- 
ment. He himself describes it as containing a 
^^ hypothesis to account for a diflBculty;^^ the 
^^ difficulty ^^ being that the ^^ successor of the 
Apostles ^^ has plainly repudiated the apostolic 
precedents by which he assumes to be bound. 
Many modern theories as to the nature and 
import of baptism, and the Scriptural terms 
describing it, may justly be described by the 
same title. Inherited practices as to mode and 
subject, and notions as to symbolism do not 
coincide "\yith Scriptural language; hence ^^ hypo- 
theses'^ eyer springing to a<x)ount for the ^^diffi- 
culty.'' Two of these theories — the Eomish and 
the Broad Church — distinctly admit that the 
^^ mould'' Paul speaks of has been broken. 
Bossuet says, ^^We are able to make it appear 
by the acts of councils and by ancient ritual, 
that for thirteen hundred years baptism was 
administered by plunging." AVall in his History 
of Infant Baptism says further, that this has never 
ceased in any except a Papal nation.^ Dean 
Stanley, who may stand for the Broad Church, 
says, "No existing ritual of any European 
Charcli offers any lilceness^^ to the apostolic ordi- 
nance. " The change from immersion to sprink- 

1 London, 1845. 

2 Ed., Nashville, 1860, p. 728. 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 33 

ling has set aside the larger part of the apostolic 
language regarding baptism, and has altered the 
very meaning of the word/' ^ For this frankly 
admitted boldness in reconstructing the original 
rite, the Romanist offers as a justification the 
supremacy and infallibility of the Church. Dean 
Stanley proposes instead the sanction of ^Hhe 
spirit which lives and moves in human society, 
and can override even the most sacred ordi- 
nances/' 

A CURIOUS 

But there is still a third, and both curiously 
and unfortunately, a far more modern theory. 
Curiously, because if true, it is wonderful that it 
was never discovered by those who wrote the 
primitive Greek, as it has never yet occurred to 
those who inherit the language. Unfortunately, 
because of the acres of apology and casuistry it 
might have saved if broached before. This " hy- 
pothesis '' removes the ^^ difficulty'' by a simple 
expedient. "The ^ mould' never was broken," it 
mildly suggests, " for it was made of material so 
elastic and flexible as to be incapable of being 
broken." A word was sagaciously cliosen, as it 
appears, to describe it, so plastic, that into what- 
ever country the gospel should come, its messen- 
gers might inquire what particular form may be 

^ Nineteenth Century/ Magazine, VI., p. 698. 
C 



34 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

most congenial to the customs, convenience, or 
tastes of the people, and thereupon answer, ^Hhe 
word means that/^ We have heard of the Judge 
who left it to the prisoner to say " what day would 
be convenient for him to be hanged ^^ — but never 
of a law ambiguously framed for the express pur- 
pose of leaving it to the prisoner's comfort or 
caprice how he should be hanged, or whether he 
should be hanged at all. Devotion to such a 
theory would soon produce for us a genuinely 
^4imp-back'' Bible — limp, not as to binding only, 
but all the way through. 

These theories, so extraordinary and so perilous 
in their tendencies, have all grown out of a com- 
mon exigency. First practically departing from 
the ^^ pattern" Christ had given — ^then "willing 
to justify,'^ rather than to rectify, that departure 
— ^men have successfully substituted for his 
supremacy that of the Infallible Pope, or the 
infallible nineteenth century; or reduced his 
sceptre to a mocking " reed '^ by the application 
of the " flexible-interpretation '^ to his words of 
command* 

APPLYING THE "SUEVIVAl/^ THEORY. 

But if the original command was in fact ex- 
plicit, and the original rite distinct and uniform, 
what rational explanation can be given of diver- 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 35 

sities so early and so great? Here again we are 
reminded at once of Archbishop Whately^s sug- 
gestion, and bidden to ask if there be any 
radical and constant ^Hendencies of human na- 
ture" likely to furnish a clew. Dean Stanley's^ 
article (in the Nineteenth Century. Magazine) on 
Baptism, begins with the remark that he intends 
to consider ^^what is the inner meaning Avhich 
has more or less survived all the changes through 
which it has passed/^ Dr. G. A. Jacob (also of 
the English Church) remarks of the baptism of 
infants, that it is ^^not to be found in the New 
Testament/^ but that we find there " the funda- 
mental idea from which it was afterwards de- 
velopedJ^^ These words "survival" and "de- 
velopment" are "half in the speech of Ashdod/' 
To Ashdod let us go, therefore, for interpre- 
tation. 

A "survival," in scientific parlance, is a cus- 
tom or notic>n which has come over from a 
former state of society, but is no longer in- 
telligible, because from gradual loss of its origi- 
nal form or otherwise, its original meaning has 
also been lost.^ The habit, like a Fourth of 

^ Nineteenth Century Magazine, YI., p. 685. 

2 Ecclesiastical Polity of New Testament (New York, 
1872), pp. 270, 271. 

3 Tylor's Primitive Culture (New York, 1874), vol. 
I., p. 70, seq. 



36 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

July pin-wheel, goes on whirling after its fire is 
burnt out. The Tyrolese peasant crosses him- 
self when he yawns, the Italian says Fdicita 
when his neighbor sneezes, and wise people 
everyw^here are troubled at overturning the salt- 
cellar. But if you ask why, all will answer 
with the stolid Mexican, ^^Who knows ?^^ The 
modern soldier thinks the hair streaming from 
his helmet a mere ornamental device; but Mr. 
Euskin says it is a reminiscence of the mane 
that once hung down the back of the savage, 
who donned the skin of the wild beast he had 
killed, to steal its courage.^ 

*^ Development'^ in the scientific sense is that 
process of change through which, whether by 
accretion or decretion, by improvement or degen- 
eration, customs, and all things else, have come 
to their present form. Every existing fact is to be 
studied as a fossil, whose features, enlarged, con- 
fused, or worn down in petrifaction, assimilation, 
and wave-tossing, still may be dimly read; 
remembering that the forces that shaped it are 
constant and calculable. The history of words, 
for instance, may be traced with considerable 
certainty, according to Professor Sayce,^ by the 
recognition of three universal tendencies, viz. : " 1. 

^Eagle's N'est (N. Y., 1873), p. 190. ^Introduction to 
Science of Language (London, 1880), vol. I., p. 163, seq. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 37 

Imitation or analogy ^^ : e.g., the Chinese trying 
to speak English falls into Pigeon-English; the 
Frenchman Gallicizes our words into ros-bif and 
bif-teck; and the temporary Parisian perpetually 
throws his small force of badly drilled French 
words into a hollow square^ so as not to seem too 
exotic. ^^2. A wish to be dear and emphatie,^' 
This taxes the inventive faculty. It invents new 
words, or new meanings for old words. The 
modern use of ^^ evolution ^^ is an illustration. 
Every political campaign produces new epithets 
and catch-words, which sometimes live. In John 
Wesley^s time ^^sentin^entaP^ was new. He 
wrote of Sterne's Sentimental Journey , ^^Senti- 
mental is not English.^' He might as w^ell have 
said Continental. But one fool makes many. 
The word has become fashionable, though it 
means nothing.'^ ^^3. Laziness/^ leading to 
"phonetic decay.'' This clips the ears and tail, 
and sometimes cuts through the body of words, 
as in the slovenly "gent" and "bus." It loses 
good words, or spills the meaning out of them. 
So "Magdalen" becomes "Maudlin" — and a 
"simple" man a fool. Through this unhappy 
mutilation and defacing of the coin of speech we 
are cut oif from commerce with former ages, as 
with foreign countries, except through the inter- 
vention of the philological money-changer. 



38 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

Unhappy it certainly is, for as Dean Trench 
once remarked, "Hardly any original thoughts 
on mental or social subjects ever make their way 
among mankind . . until aptly selected words or 
phrases have, as it were, nailed them down and 
held them fdstJ^ ^ Elsewhere he likens words to 
ships which " convey the mental treasures of one 
period to the generations that follow : and laden 
with this, their precious freight, they sail across 
gulfs of time in which empires have suffered 
shipwreck/^ ^ How harmful then to tear up the 
fixed symbol — to wreck the freighted ship. 

Now all that is here said of words, which are 
forms of speech, is true of rites, which are forms 
of action, meant to serve a like end, and subject 
to peril from like causes. To be like the heathen, 
Jeroboam made a golden calf, through which to 
worship the true God. In like spirit Rome has 
since borrowed the mass from Buddhists, and 
holy water from Pagan temples. Israel " forgot 
his Maker,^^ but emphasized his religiosity by 
"building temples.^^ Rome "shortened the Deca- 
logue, but lengthened the Creed ;^^ she took the 
cup from the laity — but added the elevation and 

1 On the Study of Words, (New York, Twenty-fifth 
Ed.), p. 26. 

2 Ih., p. 28. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTBINE. 39 

adoration of the host, and multiplied idle cere- 
monies. 

To satisfy the people's love of ease she has, in 
Dean Stanley^s words, had the '' boldness '^ to 
'' substitute a few drops of water for the ancient 
bath." " Through the history of sacrifice," says 
Mr. Tylor, in his Primitive Culture, ^4t has 
occurred to many nations that cost may be 
economized without impairing eificiency." Ac- 
cordingly, " in Madagascar the head of the sacri- 
ficed beast is set upon a pole, and the blood and 
fat are rubbed on the stones of the altar" (in 
lieu of the gift of the whole beast, as formerly) ; 
'' and Scotchmen still living remember the corner 
of a field being left untilled for the Goodman's 
croft (i. e., the deviFs); but the principle of 
^cheating the deviV was already in vogue, and the 
piece of land allotted was but a worthless scrap J' ^ 

lEd., New York, 1874, vol. II., pp. 370, 399-402. 



CHAPTER III. 

BAPTISM, THE RESUBBECTIOX, AXD HISTORIC 
CHRISTIAXITY. 

BAPTISM is defined by the Congregational 
Union of England and AVales in theii' de- 
liverance of 1833, to be ^^the application of water 
to the subject ^^ in the name of the Trinity .V The 
whole significance of the rite, according to this 
definition, is in the natural symbolism of water 
as a cleansing agent, ^^ putting away the filth of 
of the flesh /^ The writer of Ecce Homo inter- 
prets the Lord^s Supper by a similar rule. " The 
meal consisted of bread and wine, the simplest 
and in those countries most universal elements of 
of food/^ ^^A common meal is the mast natural 
and universal way of expressing, maintaining, 
and as it were ratifying relatioixs of friendship/^ 
The primary idea* being therefore the expression 
of mutual friendship, " The Christian communion 
is a club-dinnei\^^ ^ 

Accepting these suggestions as quite in their line, 

iSchaff, Creeds of Oiristendom, vol. III., p. 732. 
^Ecce Homo (Boston, 1868), pp. 187, 188. 
40 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 41 

the modern ^^ evolution^' school push them to their 
logical issue in the denial of any authoritative 
institution or historic significance in either ordi- 
nance. Mr. Herbert Spencer devotes his book 
on Ceremonial Institutions mainly to ^^ reasons 
for rejecting the current hypothesis that cere- 
monies originate in conscious symbolization^ and 
for entertaining the belief that in every case they 
originate by evolution.^^ ^ Mr. Tylor in his Prim- 
itive Culture concludes that according to the 
^^ethnographic method in theology/^ ^^ a vast pro- 
portion of doctrines and rites known among 
mankind are not to be judged as direct products 
of the particular religious systems which give them 
sanction; for they are in fact more or less modi- 
fied results adopted from previous systems.^ He 
instances baptism^ assuming it to consist simply 
in the "application of water/^ as a mere prolong- 
ation of heathen lustration — water being in 
either case the natural and universal symbol of 
purifying agency.^ By parity of reasoning the 
Lord's Supper would find its origin and sufficient 
explanation in the primitive custom of " eating 
salt'' together as a pledge of mutual fidelity. 

By this process all reminiscence of Christ or 
his work is boldly purged out of both ordinances, 
and the historic relations of Christianity are 

1 (New York, 1880.) 2 Vol. II., p. 451. ^ /^.^ pp. 430, 
441. 



42 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

practically treated as unreal or insignificant. If 
the characteristic symbols of our faith express 
only or mainly the present and isolated fact of 
our purification through water^ and our fellow- 
ship through bread and wine^ why busy ourselves 
with a past to which they do not point us? What 
to us, then, more than to Festus, are those '' ques- 
tions of their own superstition," especially ^^of 
one Jesus which was dead, whom Paul affirmed 
to be alive." The Scotch Sermons of 1880 plainly 
state that the great battle of the last century over 
the credibility of the miraculous was ^^an affair 
of outposts altogether," and touched "no vital 
point of revelation." Strauss flattered himself 
at first that his view was " more Christian than 
the old Christian one itself," for although he had 
sought to obliterate the historic Christ, it was 
only that he might substitute for the transient 
person an eternal idea. " Not by immersion ;" 
says Canon Curteis, in considering what conces- 
sions the Church of England may make to win 
back Dissenters, "in that point the Church's 
freedom must be unflinchingly maintained in 
order to teach the spirituality of the Lord^s sacra- 
merits^ by using the drop of water and the frag- 
ment of bread to represent the regenerating bath 
and the eucharistic feast." ^ That is to say, the 
1 Bamp. Lee, 1871. ''Dissent., etc^ (London), p. 289. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 43 

idea is only truly to be propagated by effacing 
the formative fact, the " spirit ^^ only by defacing 
the significant '' letter/^ 

THINGS TO BE EXPLAINED. 

But facts are not destroyed by supercilious 
treatment, and it is unavailing to attempt the 
ideal reconstruction of a history which has not 
first been actually abolished. The primary 
question is one, not of theory, but of testimony. 
The assailant of Christianity from the side of 
historic criticism is therefore called to explain the 
following indisputable circumstances : 

1. The continuous and uniform belief of the 
church, from the first century, that it had its 
origin in the facts narrated in the New Testa- 
ment. 

2. The existence, as acknowledged even by 
the most extravagant criticism, of at least four of 
PauFs letters (viz. : to the Galatians, the Romans, 
and the two to the Corinthians), within a short 
generation of the alleged occurrence of the facts 
therein cited. 

3. The general observance to this day of a rite 
which, as the Apostle reminds the Corinthians, 
had been instituted by our Lord "on the night 
in which he was betrayed ^^ as an enduring testi- 
mony of his crucifixion. 



44 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

The value of this last link in the chain has 
been often urged by writers on the evidences of 
Christianity^ and will not be underrated by those 
who are familiar with the principles of historic 
inquiry. Por 1. It reaches back to the event 
itself^ and is of the nature of contemporaneous 
testimony. 2. Being a concrete act participated 
in by many, its testimony was unequivocal. 3. 
It was not only the reminder of a fact, but a 
scenic rehearsal of its very form. It was not a 
feast, for it was established at a feast. The bread 
and wine were present, and were being shared in ; 
but they told no story, until he put the breaking 
of the one and pouring of the other into emblem- 
atic association with the breaJciiig of his body 
and the shedding of his blood, and so bade them 
''show the Lord's death till he come.'' This 
ceremonial is forever sundered from all heathen 
feasts, therefore, not by the use of bread and 
wine, which is common to both, but by the fot^m 
of that use with which no heathen rite has any- 
thing in common. 

But the question of the historic reality of our 
Lord's death is not, after all, the cardilial one in 
the battle with the skeptics. Serious critias 
have rarely doubted that, or cared much for it. 
For that death, in itself, involved no supernat- 
ural element^ and could not, however devoutly 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 45 

believed^ fairly account for Christian history. 
The true crisis of faith is not at the cross, but 
at the sepulchre. Did Jesus really rise from the 
dead? ^^This/' says Strauss, "i^ the centre of 
the centre — the real heart of Christianity;^^ 
"with it the truth of Christianity stands or 
falls.^^^ "If I could believe the resurrection/' 
says Spinoza, "I would become a Christian at 
once.'' Ewald says "It is the culmination of all 
the miraculous events which are conceivable from 
the beginning of history to its close." 

To this respond affirmatively such defenders 
of the faith as Christlieb, "The resurrection is 
the proof of all other dogmas, the foundation of 
our Christian life and hope, the soul of the entire 
apostolic preaching, the corner-stone on which 
the church is built."^ Westcott says: "We must 
place it in the very front of our confession, with 
all that it includes, or we must be prepared to 
lay aside the Christian name." ^ " To preach the 
fact of the resurrection was the first function of 
the Evangelists; to embody the doctrine of the 
resurrection is the great office of the church ; to 
learn the meaning of the resurrection is the task, 
not of one age only, but of all." Fairbairn 

1 Christlieb, Modern Doubt, (New York, 1874), p. 455. 

2 Ih., p. 448. 

^ Gospel of the Resurrection (London, 1881), p. 7. 



46 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

says, " It created the church.'' '' It is a regime 
of historical yet supernatural Christianity." 

There are, therefore, two great Christian facts : 
the death and resurrection of Christ. There 
are also two great Christian ordinances: the 
Lord's Supper and Baptism. Of these facts, the 
first would seem lea^ to need historic witnessing, 
since it does not trench on the supernatural, and 
since its significance is mainly for the believer, 
revealing the inner secrets of salvation. Yet for 
its perennial confirmation, as well as illustration, 
provision is confessedly made in the Lord's 
Supper, the inward fronting rite of the church. 
The other fact, on the contrary, fronts the world, 
challenging its scrutiny as miraculous, and de- 
manding its assent as verified by reliable testi- 
mony. To this fact, therefore, so pre-eminent 
and decisive, it might reasonably be expected 
that baptism, the only other Cliristian rite, and 
also the outward fronting one, would lend its 
needed and confirmatory testimony. 

BAPTISM AXD THE EESURRECTIOIS'. 

The candid skeptic, however, will be surprised, 
on reading in the Westminster Catechism that 
^^ baptism is rightly administei^ed by pouring or 
sprinkling ivater upon the person." To this he 
will find Dr. E. J. Breckenridge, of Kentucky, 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 47 

naturally adding, "I find nothing in the Scrip- 
tures to warrant the assertion that there is any 
isdcramental commemoration by the mode of bap- 
tism of the burial of the body of Jesus,' ^^ Hav- 
ing further learned from Dr. John Eadie, of 
Glasgow, that believers ^'even in immersion do 
not go through a process having any semblance 
to the burial and resu^rrectimi of ChrisV^;'^ and 
from Dr. Charles Hodge, of Princeton, that in 
Paul's words (Rom. 6 : 4) — " buried with him by 
baptism into death'' — "it is not necessary to as- 
sume that there is any reference to the immersion 
of the body in baptism, as though it were a 
burial; " ^ he will probably be puzzled to account 
for the zeal and ingenuity put forth in dis- 
proving concerning one ordinance what is so 
eagerly claimed for the other, and is equally 
presumable of both — that they were meant to 
be commemorative as well as symbolic. This 
probative function may be lightly valued now, 
but " from the beginning it was not so." 

The peculiar evidential value of Paul's state- 
ments concerning the facts and institutions of 
early Christianity has been more and more 
recognized of late. He was at the time of his 

^ Knowledge of God Subjectively Considered, p. 572. 

2 Commentary on Colossians (London, 1856), p. 154. 

3 Commentary on Romans (Philadelphia, 1864), p. 
305. 



48 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

conversion a mature man, of too high culture and 
too wide observation to be charged with super- 
stition or shallowness. He had too much at 
stake to be risked on the unverified assumption 
of so stupendous a fact as the resurrection of 
Christ from the dead. He saw as clearly as 
nineteen centuries have proved to us, that on the 
reality of that fact all else hung — for without it 
he declared his " faith was vain.^^ His letters 
are among the earliest, if not the very earliest, of 
the New Testament documents, and four of them 
stand, as before remarked, unchallenged to this 
day. In two of these (Romans and 1 Corinthians), 
written to be publicly read in metropolitan heathen 
cities within about twenty-five years of its 
alleged occurrence, he distinc^tly claims the reality 
of the resurrection as an established and com- 
monly admitted fact. As justifying this, he 
refers implicitly to the testimony of " the greater 
part^^ of "more than five hundred brethren ^^ still 
surviving the event; and explicitly to that of the 
abiding ordinance which, as he reminds the 
Romans, is the ^'likeness of Christ's resurrection,^' 
and which he assures the Corinthians is meaning- 
less, if it do not mean that. For so, according 
to the uniform custom of the early interpreters, 
we are to interpret 1 Cor. 15: 29.^ 

^Stanley, Commentary on Corinthians (London, 1876), 
p. 304. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 49 

BAPTISM A HISTORIC WITNESS. 

Baptism, bearing this legible ^4mprint/' was 
in PauFs esteem a historic monument^ 1. Of the 
fact that Christ had risen. 2. Of the preeminence 
of the fact, and its consequent primary place in 
Christian doctrine. 3. Of the corporeality of the 
fact, as against all mysticizing tendencies. It 
follows, therefore, that by the abandonment of 
its appointed form, baptism ceases to be a witness 
to the reality of the resurrection. Of Paul's allu- 
sion in Eom. 6 : 4, 5, Conybeare and Howson say, 
^' This passage cannot be understood unless it be 
borne in mind that the primitive baptism was by 
immersion.^' Dr. Schaff says, ^^All commentators 
of note (except Stuart and Hodge) expressly ad- 
mit or take it for granted that in this verse .... 
the ancient prevailing mode of baptism by 
immersion is implied, as giving force to the idea 
of going down of the old and rising up of the new 
man."^ The obviousness of the parallelism is 
implied in the continual coupling together of tlio 
two ideas in Scripture, and in the writings and 
emblematism of the early Christians. Christ's 
Messiahship was "manifested'' by his baptism, 
his Sonship was "declared" by his resurrection.^ 

^Lange's Commentary on Romans (New York, 18G9), 
Note, p. 202. » John 1 : 31 ; Rom. 1 : 4. 

D 



60 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

The apostles were ordained to be "witnesses of 
his resurrection/^ "beginning with the baptism 
of John/^ If^ as Peter says, the "figure'^ of 
baptism " saves us/^ it is " by the resurrection of 
Jesus Christ/^ So Cyril, of Jerusalem, says, 
" Thou gomg down into the water, and in a man- 
ner buried in the waters as he in the rock, art 
raised again, walking in newness of life/^ 
Chrysostom says, "For as his body, buried in 
the earth ; bore for fruit the salvation of the world, 
so also ours buried in baptism bore for fruit right- 
eousness .... and will bear also the final gift of 
the resurrection.^^ TertuUian says "For by an 
image we die in baptism; but we truly rise in 
the flesh, as did also Christ.^^ Many of the early 
baptisteries were in the shape of sarcophagi^ or 
octagonal, in reference to the number 8, the sym- 
bol of resurrection. "Remove the resurrection," 
says Fairbairn substantially, "and the Lord^s Day, 
the Supper, and Baptism would be inexplicable." ^ 
Observe the force of these statements. The 
" application of water," as significant of cleans- 
ing, would have introduced no new idea, nor 
demanded any new fact to explain its origin. It 
was the familiar and immemorial symbol both 
of. Jews and heathen. But it was far otherwise 

^Studies in Life of Christ (N. Y., 1882), p. 359. Cf. 
also Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 128. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 51 

if the idea portrayed were one so novel and 
startling as that of a Messianic resurrection from 
the dead. 

The superior evidential value of a rite is not 
always recognized. It is an aded faith, con- 
spicuous, unequivocal. It was vain, said Paul, 
for Peter to preach the equality of the Gentiles 
while he would not eat with them. Peter, on 
the day of Pentecost, having set forth the pro- 
phecy and the correspondent fact of Christ^s 
resurrection, demanded not only a verbal assent, 
but a baptism in the " likeness ^^ of that resurrec- 
tion, as a visible avowal of their faith in it. 
^^ Belief expressed in action,'' says Canon West- 
cott, "is for the most part the strongest evidence 
one can have of any historic event.'' How tre- 
mendous therefore is the significance of the fact 
that on that day, less than two months after the 
alleged transaction, in the very city where it was 
said to have taken place and where the evidence 
could best be sifted, three thousand people by a 
public and unequivocal symbolic act " set to their 
seal" that the resurrection had really occurred; 
and thereby not only boldly challenged all skep- 
ticism, but irrevocably announced their separa- 
tion from all the old ties of friendship and faith. 
If the value of testimony depend on its having 
been contemporaneous, contiguous, from many 



62 THE MOULD OF DOGTEIJSE. 

witnesses, unequivocally expressed, and impartial, 
or against interest, then may that be more truly 
said of the resurrection as evidenced in baptism, 
which has been said of the crucifixion as con- 
firmed by the Lord^s Supper, viz.: "Of no other 
event in the history of man have we an equal 
guarantee of the historic truth of the facts/^ ^ 

The immense damage done to Christianity by 
the obliteration of the original features of bap- 
tism is manifest in the fact that it has not only, 
where so changed, lost all present witnessing 
power, but that it has led men, as we have seen, 
to deny that it ever had such power; and so to 
seek to invalidate the earliest and most authori- 
tative testimony to the most vital fact in Chris- 
tian history. The conservative power of a care- 
fully preserved rite is enormous. ^^It serves,'^ 
in the language of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, 
''to stereotype an oral tradition, and preserve it 
from the license of imagination or the distor- 
tions of forgetfulness.^^ Like the arrowhead 
inscriptions of Babylon, and the hieroglyphics of 
Egypt, its definite message is cut into the visible 
life of men, as theirs is cut in stone, and remains 
like them, changeless amid the changing. 

It remains to speak of baptism as meant to 
bear witness, 2. Of the priniary and preeminent 

1 Cf. Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 133. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 53 

place of the resuiTection in the Christian system.' 
The Acts significantly precede the Epistles. 
The announcement of the fact of the resurrec- 
tion, and the possibility of salvation, historically 
preceded the unfolding of the theory of the 
atonement and the method of salvation logically 
involved therein. Baptism, correspondingly, the 
first appointed act of the believer, was a joyful 
acceptance of tlie fact preached with all its yet 
unrevealed implications. The early catacombs 
had no crucifix or sorrowful inscriptions, but 
many-blended and cheerful symbols of baptism 
and the resurrection. To-day we find the 
Eucharist jealously guarded (having been by 
the Council of Trent declared ^^ above all other 
sacraments,^^ because while they may sanctify, 
"m this is the Author himself of sanctity '') while 
baptism is made the toy of ecclesiasticism and 
^^ convenience.^' By a precise parallelism we 
find Rome occupying the whole horizon with 
her realistic and purposely painful visions of 
the suffering or dead Christ; and Protestantism 
giving fifty-one weeks in the year to. philosoph- 
izing about the atonement, and Easter Sunday 
only to the definite and emphatic proclamation 
of the atonement itself as a fact completed and 
made real to us by the resurrectiqn of pfirist. 
There is no room here for a detailed review 



54 THE MOULD OF DO CT BINE. 

of the steps by which this result has been 
reached. Suffice it to say that the gradual 
ignoring of the primary function of baptism as 
a witness entailed a parallel subsidence from 
view of the fact to which it witnessed. Priestly 
incantations and scholastic subtleties crowded the 
foreground, and the risen Christ slowly faded 
into the distance, where he seems to the be- 
wildered masses still to hang on the cross, sad, 
severe, and inaccessible. 

Finally, and only by way of hint, we must 
consider a subject most momentous in our time: 
the value of the definite and inflexible form of 
baptism as a witness, 3. Of the corpm^eal actu- 
ality of Christ's resurrection. The idea of 
immortality was common to all men, but that 
of a bodily resurrection was mocked as absurd 
by the Athenians, or refined into a metaphor as 
in its literal form too gross by the Gnostics 
[Knowers). Curiously, the Gnostics of that day 
and the Agnpstics of this are closely akin : and 
the spreading eaves of their roof shelter thou- 
sands between, who, through various degrees of 
real though perhaps unsuspected consanguinity, 
are bound up with them in a common thought. 
Among these are the Mystics, Quakers, Sweden- 
borgians, Transcendentalists, and a large part of 
that school who worship the Aurora Borealis 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 55 

under the name of Liberalism. To them the 
primal curse is subjection of the idea to formal 
expression. The formal churchy the formal rite, 
the formal Scripture, formal knowledge, and 
even formal existence, are vulgar, and must be 
volatilized. Listen to Matthew Arnold's ren- 
dering of the plain Gospel narrative: "To the 
mind of Jesus, his own resurrection after a short 
sojourn in the grave was the victory of his cause 
after his death, and at the price of his death. 
His disciples materialized his resurrection, and 
their version of the matter falls day by day to 
ruin.'^ He "lived in the eternal order, and the 
eternal order never dies^ This, he argues, is our 
only possible immortality. 

Now the noticeable fact is that over against all 
theories falsely calling themselves "spiritual,'^ 
because they rejected "form'' in his day, the 
Apostle set the statement that Christianity is 
primarily and characteristically a historic religion 
— resting on the concrete manifestation of Christ 
" in the flesh," and his formal and sensible resur- 
rection — and bodying forth in vivid and graphic 
outline, in the permanent rite he had ordained, 
the literalness of that resurrection. It is not sur- 
prising to find among most of the Gnostic sects, 
as among modern "Liberals," indifference to, or 
aversion for, the formal, alike in baptism and in 



56 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

resurrection. Nor can it surprise us much more 
if the habitual blurring of the ordained outline 
of the one, to make it more "spiritual/^ should 
everywhere tend to -melt the revealed outline of 
the other into a mere gauzy metaphor. But if it 
be a metaphor, says Paul, the dead "are per- 
ished ^^ and "ye are yet in your sins/^ 



CHAPTER IV. 

BAPTISM AND THE NEW BIBTm— MODERN 
THEORIES. 

nVTO department of religious literature would 
-i-^ probably yield an anthology so rare in its 
variety, and so marvellously delicate in its shad- 
ings, as the discussion of the relations of Bap- 
tism and Regeneration. Its range is so wide, its 
relations so complex, its bulk so voluminous, 
that it would be impossible to compress into an 
essay like this a statement of it which should do 
justice to every local or individual phase of 
opinion. Nothing is aimed at but a compendious 
statement, which it is hoped may escape the 
suspicion of at least intentional unfairness either 
as to accuracy or proportion. 

There are two great questions involved. 

THE FIRST GREAT QUESTION. 

1. Does baptism itself regenerate? 

This question brings to the stand at once all 
advocates of infant baptism to explain a custom 
which, if it do not imply regeneration inde- 

67 



58 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

pendent of faith, very much needs explanation. 
Fairly representative of the divers responses are 

* (a) The Theory of Rome. This seems to be 
unequivocal. The Council of Trent declared 
that ^^in baptism, not only remission of original 
sin was given, but also all which properly has the 

- nature of sin is cut off/^ It makes one "a 
Christian, a child of God, and an heir of heaven.^^ 
As to faith, Cardinal Wiseman says, "The 
Church teaches that it is a virtue essentially in- 
fused of God in baptism ; and such must be more 
or less the belief of every Church that adopts the 
practice of infant baptism.^' ^ The whole efficacy 
of baptism, however, is made to depend on the 
intent of the administrator. The doctrine of 
Rome, therefore, renders only one thing certain, 
viz. : the perdition of the unbaptized. It leaves 
the salvation of the baptized both uncertain and 
incomplete, for it depends for its validity on the 
secret " intent ^^ of the administrator, and for its 
consummation, even in the holiest person, on mass 
and penance here and purgatory hereafter. Rome 
therefore teaches that cleansing grace, the counter- 
part of sanctification, is wrought in baptism, but 
not regeneration, the counterpart of justification; 

^Lectures on Doctrine and Practice of Roman 
Catholic Church (Baltimore, 1862), p. 74. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE: 59 

neither of which latter ideas has a place in her 
theology. 

(b) Luther^ s Theory. Luther launched the 
Reformation from the Roman stocks with a 
single lever; the doctrine of "justification by 
faith alone/^ "Faith/^ he says, "mnst appro- 
priate the divine; all other things can be only 
signs for the operation and formation of faith/^ ^ 
The heavenly talisman was thus at once trans- 
ferred from the covetous and despotic hand of 
the priest to the heart of the believer : for the 
sacraments, which had been reckoned the " Keys 
of Heaven," could no longer shut up that king- 
dom which Christ had set "open to all believers." 

Protestantism, which repudiated the authority 
of tradition, and rested the validity of every- 
thing in the Christian life on faith, inherited 
therefore a Trojan horse in infant baptism. 
"The Zwickau enthusiasts," says Neander,^ 
"who came to Wittenburg in A. D. 1522, were 
zealous opponents of infant baptism ; they raised 
a controversy upon it, and placed the Witten- 
bergers in a state of embarrassment. Mel- 
ancthon, in writing to the Elector, declared that 
"Satan had attacked them in a w^eak place, 

1 Neander, History of Christian Dogmas (Bohn, 1868), 
vol. II., p. 688. ^ K r J, 

^Ib., vol. II., p. 692. 



60 THE MOULD OF DOCTRIXE. 

for he knew not how he should refute these 
enthusiasts/^ 

But principles outrun practice, as the clouds 
fly swifter than the ships in the heavier sea 
below. There is scarcely a better illustration 
of the conservative power of established custom 
than in the tergiversations to which it brought a 
man so candid and strong as Luther, in his 
efforts to defend the retention of an old pmctice, 
directly contradictoiy of the very principle he 
was at the time tiying to establish. Infant 
baptism is not taught in Scrij)ture, he said, but 
neither can it be proved to be against Scripture. 
Baptism of com'se presupposes faith, he admit- 
ted, but "'^who can tell whether God does not 
implant faith in early childhood as in sleep ?^^ 
Faith, he fmther m^ged, is negative; infants 
therefore do have faith, because they do not 
resist the truth. "He knew how to relieve 
himself,'^ says Xeander, "though he put down 
objections more by bold assertions than by ar- 
gumeuts.^^^ 

The Augsburg Confession therefore distinctly 

reads, "concerning baptism, they teach that it 

is necessary to salvation . . . and condemn the 

Anabaptists who hold . . . that infants can be 

saved without it.''- Luther himself wrote that 

1 Xeander, Hist, of Chris. DoQinas. vol. II.. p. 
2/&zd, p. 693. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTEJNE, 61 

" baptism is the bath of regeneration, because in 
it we are born again/^ Practically, therefore, he 
only substituted sacramental for sacerdotal grace 
— ^transferring the shaping of eternal destiny 
from the inward whim of the priest to the out- 
ward whim of the parent or friend. For the 
sake of rescuing those little ones, whom Christ 
had appointed to the "kingdom of heaven,^^ out 
of the "limbo deep and broad '^ which God had 
"prepared for the devil and his angels,^^ but 
which "the Fathers ^^ had appropriated to un- 
baptized children, he sacrificed the broad prin- 
ciple of the Reformation at the shrine of a 
narrow and cruel tradition. 

(c) Calvin^ s Theory, "It is to be no means 
easy,^^ says Bishop Browne,^ "to define his doc- 
trine of baptism. Inconsistency is very little his 
character; yet on baptism he seems to have been 
somewhat inconsistent with himself.^^ To Calvin 
the one overwhelming and only creative fact in 
the universe was the definite, prevenient purpose 
of God. To conceive of the eternal fiat of that 
sovereign will as in any way dependent for its 
completion or change on the temporal accident 
of sacrament or personal intent, seemed to him 
as absurd as to expect the flame to be mastered 
by the moth that is shrivelled in it. Baptism 

* On the Thirty-nine Articles (London, 1865), p. 651. 



62 THE MOULD OF DOGTBINE, 

cannot, therefore, make one a Christian, but only 
declare the elect to be so (to whom alone the 
ordinance belongs). But since the purpose of 
God is secret, how are the truly elect to be ascer- 
tained? This is not so difficult in the case of 
adults, plain tests being supplied in Scripture 
(see 1 Thess. 1 : 4, 5; 1 Peter 1 : 2). But "elect 
infants ^^ are not to be so discerned. To escape a 
dilemma, therefore, Calvin, revolting alike at 
Rome^s sacerdotal and Luther's sacramental, fled 
to hereditary grace. He decided that the Chris- 
tian church was not a " new birth " from, but a 
prolongation of, the Jewish. Differing from 
Paul, who thought the Abrahamic with the old 
covenants "pertained to his kinsmen according 
to the flesh,'' he concluded that the measure and 
margin of electing grace are still plainly trace- 
able along the outline of genealogical descent. 
" The children," ^ says Dr. John Hall, " are born 
into the church. . . It is a mediseval superstition 
that represents the child as ' christened,' or made 
a Christian in the rite." "Our Confession of 
Faith," says the Presbyterian Assembly's Digest, 
"recognizes the right of baptism of the infant 
children only of such parents as are members 
of the church." ^ To these were added, under 

^ Questions of the Day, (New York, 1873), p. 263. 
2 (Ed., Philadelphia, 1855), p. 106. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 63 

exigency, still after the Abrahamic idea, the 
^' infant slaves of Christian Masters/^ ^ 

But now again the ^^ Trojan horse ^^ disgorges 
discord within the Genevan ramparts. If elec- 
tion is already determined by birth, and the 
salvation of the elect assured by immutable 
decree, baptism cannot add to the certainty of the 
one or the security of the other. The ^^ elect 
infant ^^ will be saved without baptism: the non- 
elect cannot be helped by it. If baptism do not 
" convey ^^ as well as affirm grace, it is nugatory, 
and its omission involves neither peril nor sin. 
Moreover, since the elect cannot apostatize, there 
is serious peril in positively and solemnly desig- 
nating as "children of God^^ those who may 
afterward give every indication of being "chil- 
dren of the DeviP^ rather.^ 

Since Calvin thought with the other Reformers, 
however, that (in the language of the English 
Church) infant baptism was "in any wise to be 
retained,^^ he boldly made a place for it by 
knocking out the corner-stone of his entire 
system. For in his Catechism for the Genevan 
children he taught it to be " certain that pardon 
of sins and newness of life is offered to us in 

^ Presbyterian Assembly's Digest, p. 107. 

2Cf. Bossuet, Variations (Dublin, 1829), vol. 1. 
p. 360. 



64 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 



baptism/^ ^^ We must take heed not to tie God's 
grace to the sacraments;'^ he writes again in his 
Commentary on the Acts^ ^^ for the administration 
of baptism profits nothing except where God 
thinks fit. '' The efficacy of baptism/' according 
to the Westminster Confession, ^^is not tied to 
that moment of time wherein it is administered; 
yet, notwithstanding, by the right use of this 
ordinance the grace promised is not only offered 
but really exhibited and conferred by the Holy 
Ghost to such (whether of age or infants) as 
that grace belongeth unto, according to the 
counsel of God's own will in his appointed 
time." ^ The Presbyterian doctrine, as Dr. Charles 
Hodge, of Princeton, says, is midway between 
Rome and Zwingle in this : that baptism always, 
the other that it never, conveys grace. Presby- 
terians hold only that it ^^does not uniformly or 
always at the time do so." Since ^^regeneration" 
is expressly mentioned (in Ch. 28, Art. 1 of the 
Confession) as included in the ^^ grace promised," 
and therefore ^^ really exhibited and conferred" in 
baptism, it is plainly taught that baptism does 
regenerate, only not exclusively, always, nor 
instantly.^ 

How narrow a rim of hope is thus left even 

^ Schaff, Creeds of Christendom (London), vol. III., 
p. 663. 2 jh.^ vol. III., p. . 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE: 65 

to Calvin's elect infant world, to say notliing of 
the awful shadow left on those who lie outside 
the circuit of the ^^ birth covenant/' For be- 
lievers' children also, as it seems, may die un- 
regenerate, being unbaptized; and the like may 
happen even after baptism, if grace be delayed 
or fail to be given therein. Now, since the un- 
regenerate cannot ^^see the kingdom of God," it 
follows either that the elect may perish after all, 
or that believers' children do not certainly com- 
pose the elect, and ought not to monopolize the 
rite of baptism. Either of these propositions 
admitted is fatal to Calvin's theory of grace; 
either of them denied is fatal to his theory of 
baptism. 

{d) Zmngle^s Theory, Zwingle alone, of the 
three great leaders of the Reformation, con- 
sistently and at every point repudiated the 
saving efficacy of rites in themselves. "If thfe 
sacraments were the things they signified," he 
argued, "then they could not be signs; For 
the sign and the thing signified cannot be the 
same." " External baptism with water con- 
tributes nothing to tlie washing away of sin." 
"Original sin," he strangely added, however, 
"does not deserve damnation if a person has 
believing parents."^ And still more strangely, 

* Browne nn Thirty-Nine Articles^ p. 657. 



66 IHE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

maintaining that the ^^ thing signified^' in bap- 
tism was a pledge ^Ho be a hearer and disciple 
of God^ and to obey his laws/' he held that such 
a pledge might be fitly administered to infants. 

{e) Current Theories. Of these four theories, 
the Romish, or sacerdotal, lies at the foundation 
of the English Church, filtering down thence 
through the Methodist; the Lutheran, or sacra- 
mental, largely pervades the Continental 
churches; the Calvinistic, or hereditary, has 
shaped the Scotch and other Presbyterian 
churches; and the Zwinglian, or dedicatory, 
though not distinctly avowed, has deeply im- 
pressed the history of Congregationalism. 

The English Articles of 1536 were undis- 
guisedly Romish.^ They endorsed penance, con- 
fession, purgatory, image-worship, and other 
superstitions. They plainly declared baptism 
"a thing necessary for the attaining of ever- 
lasting life,'' ^^nsomuch as that infants and 
children dying in their infancy shall undoubtedly 
be saved thereby, and otherwise not." Sub- 
sequent revisions show the traces of Lutheran 
and Calvinistic pressure, the latter being espe- 
cially anti-sacerdotal and democratic as embodied 
in Puritanism. The Thirty-Nine Articles as 
finally revised still describe the baptized as 

1 Hard wick, History of Thirty-Nine Articles, p. 50. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 67 

"christened/^ and baptism as "a sign of re- 
generation^ or the new birth, whereby as by an 
instrument they that receive it rightly are grafted 
into the Church ;^^ and the Catechism charac- 
terizes it as a proceeding whereby the baptized 
is " made a member of Christ, the child of God, 
and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven ^^ — 
words varied only trivially in form and not at 
all in sense from the Eomish formula from 
which they came. The diversity of strata in . 
her growhig formularies and literature give pre- 
text enough for the multiplication of theoretic 
conflicts in the English Church, and point 
enough to the not quite accurate quip of Lord 
Chatham that she has ^^ Calvinistic Articles, a 
Papistical service, and an xlrminian clergy.'' 

The Methodist Articles were based on those 
of the English Church, since often revised in 
minor points. Concerning them John Wesley 
wrote, "It is certain our Church supposes that 
all who are baptized in their infancy are at the 
same time born again : and it is allowed that the 
whole office for the baptism of infants proceeds 
on this supposition.''^ Watson, a standard au- 
thority in Methodism, says of infant baptism, " It 
secures, too, the gifts of the Holy Spirit in those 
secret spiritual influences by which the actual 

^ Senno7is (London, 1872), vol. II. (sermon 45), p. 74. 



68 IHE MOULD OF DOCTBINE. 

regeneration of those infants who die in infancy 
is effected." This^ says the venerable Dr. Curry, 
in a recent article^ more fully to be referred to a 
few pages farther on, Avas the doctrine of the 
earliest American Methodist ministers, to which, 
modified somewhat in expression (it may be 
fairly inferred from his language), he still holds. 

Presbyterianism does not seem to recede from 
the Westminster platform. Dr. John Hall says, 
"the only reason w^hy the baptized child does 
not sit at the Lord's Table, of course, is the 
counterpart of the restraint on the vote of the 
American youth." ^ 

Congregationalism, notwithstanding the con- 
genital affinity of the Savoy with the Westmin- 
ster Articles, and its high-church developments 
in New England history, shows strong tenden- 
cies toward reaction against the Calvinistic in- 
terpretation of infant baptism, and even against 
the continuance of the practice itself. Dr. R. 
W. Dale, in a volume not long since published, 
protested that "no one can become a member of 
a Congregational church by birth," supplement- 
ing the statement by a vigorous and destructive 
criticism of the whole birthright theory.^ 

Nothing is more curious to observe, in review- 

^ Qnestions of the Day, p. 268. 

2 Ecclesia (Second Series, London, 1871), p. 371. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRIJSE, 69 

ing this subject, than the fertility of ingenuity 
displayed in saving the Scriptural doctrine of 
salvation by faith alone from the manifest affront 
put on it by the administration of baptism where 
faith is impossible. This is attempted in every 
case by an intruded fiction. The transaction 
does rest on faith, says Rome — the faith of the 
Church : not so, says the English Church, but 
on the faith of the sponsor : not so, says Calvin, 
but on the faith of the parents: not so, says 
Luther, but on the unconscious faith of the child 
itself. If these devices succeed in justifying the 
practice, it will be only because " faith is made, 
void.'^ 

THE SECOND GREAT QUESTION. 

2. Does Baptism symbolize Regeneration f 
The British Conference of AVesleyan Metho- 
dists has, during the present year, after a seven 
years' controversy, so modified its formulary as 
(in the opinion of the London Quarterly Review,^ 
the able organ of that body), to decide ^Hhat the 
Lord has not in the course of his ministry con- 
nected regeneration with baptism in any way.'' 
This event affords an apt illustration of the 
working of the very principle which these arti- 
cles are designed to illustrate — viz. : the power 
of symbolic rites as moulds of doctrine: un- 
1 October Number, 1882, p. 146. 



70 THE MOULD OF DOCTRIXE. 

broken^ they hold the outline of opinion secure ; 
broken, they refashion plastic opinion to thei 
own altered form, and silently but steadily seek 
to reduce to the same conformity the harder lines 
of formulated statement. 

Baptism, administered without preliminary 
faith in the recipient, by its symbolic form 
compels some theory- of regeneration without 
faith, and ultimately a reconstruction of the 
whole statement of the ground of salvation. 
Baptism, so altered in form as no longer to 
symbolize regeneration, but ^^ purification ^^ in- 
stead, tends rapidly to substitute the idea of 
"purification^^ for that of regeneration in the 
scheme of doctrine, and to revolutionize creed 
statements accordingly. 

Students of doctrinal history will not have 
been unobservant of a steadily growing aversion 
for the term "baptismal regeneration,'^ and the 
equally steady growth of emphasis on "bap- 
tismal grace'' as a substitute therefor. Dr. 
Hodge in his Theology , devotes a long section to 
the battering down of the one and the exaltation 
of the other.^ Episcopal writers betray a keen 
scent in the same direction.^ Dr. Curry, in the 

lYol. III., p. 591, seg. 

2 See American Quarterly Church Revieiv, vol. 
XXIY., p. 122, seq. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 71 

remarkable article before referred to (in The 
Independent of Nov. 2, 1882), repudiates the 
doctrine of baptismal regeneration, out of which 
he says infant baptism was " developed/^ but 
still insists that the ^^ sacraments of the Church 
ordained by Christ'^ (by evolution, as it appears) 
'' are not simply ceremonies : but rather that they 
are really effective through the spiritual grace 
that accompanies them.'^ The able writer in the 
London Quarterly above cited, also insists that 
^^no harm can come from a Scriptural and 
guarded maintenance of baptismal grace/' The 
^^ question as to the specific grace baptism pledges 
and conveys to the children of the Christian 
covenant finds little direct solution in Scripture, 
but much indirect illustration.'^ It is not, how- 
e^^er, ^^regeneration," he is sure, for the ^^new 
birth" is the ^^full development of the germinal 
seed" planted in baptism. 

Precisely parallel to the growth of the theory 
that baptism conveys grace only and not regener- 
ation, is that of the theory that baptism means 
purification only and not regeneration; and 
preliminary to both was that change in the form 
of the ordinance which reduced it from a vivid 
memorial of Christ's historic resurrection and the 
symbol of the believer's correspondent spiritual 
passage "through death to life," to a mere "wash- 



72 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

ing with water/^ laying sole emphasis on the 
"putting away the filth of the flesh ^^ thereby. 

Concerning all this, it is obvious to remark 
that as Christ once only rose from the dead and 
men once only are regenerated, so baptism, fitly 
complementing the analogy, is once only to be 
administered. But if grace is conferred only by 
baptism, and when so conferred is but incipient ; if 
baptism symbolize " washing ^^ only, which is from 
its very nature incomplete, — ^then either "grace" 
must forever stop short of "regeneration" and 
imperfect sanctification forever preclude perfect 
justification, or baptism must be often repeated 
until the measure of grace and holiness be full. 
They are the true Anabaptists who divide the one 
baptism into two, entailing a separate ritual and 
theory for each; or so mutilate the one baptism 
tliat, once administered, it teaches incompleteness, 
and suggests some further step to reach the actual 
new life. 



CHAPTEE V. 

BAPTISM AND TEE NEW BIRTH.— THE 
APOSTOLIC IDEA. 

IT is a noticeable circumstance that Paul's 
Epistle addressed to the Romans, busies 
itself chiefly with the Jews, and when it men- 
tions the Gentile world invariably cites the 
Greek rather than the Roman as representative 
of it. Not less remarkable is its texture. Its 
material is borrowed mainly from the Jewish 
Scriptures; its method from the Greek dialecti- 
cians ; while its vocabulary is derived from, and 
its whole spirit is redolent of, Roman law. We 
are reminded at once how, in the world's metrop- 
olis, Roman, Greek, and Jew were then dwelling 
together, equally arrogant and mutually dis- 
dainful, but together were hanging over the 
world their tri-color of prerogative, against the 
outer barbarian who was neither a citizen of the 
Empire, a disciple of the school, nor a child of 
Abraham. 

Paul was himself a Roman freeman, a Greek 
scholar, and a Hebrew of pure blood. But he 

73 



74 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

had heard a voice^ like the blast beside Jericho, 
before which the triple walls of his citadel of 
privilege had fallen flat. It was the sarae word 
that had startled Xicodemus^ assuring him that 
he too, who of all men fancied himself peculiarly 
well-born, must equally with the Gentile "dog^^ 
"be born again.'^ With peculiar authority, 
therefore, he assails the entrenchments which he 
himself has found insecure. To the Roman, he 
substantially says, "Your law cannot really 
^justify;' and it is a small thing to be on the 
right side of Roman law, yet on the wrong side 
of God^s law.^' To the Greek, "Your knowl- 
edge cannot save; a man may know, ^but how 
to perform that which is good, find not.' '' To 
the Jew, "Your birth is of no avail; high 
birth is neither preventive nor cure of low life.'' 
Jew, Roman, and Greek stand, therefore, equally 
with the base-born, nomadic, and illiterate barba- 
rian, shelterless before God's law: for "there is 
no difference." 

There is a special significance in the addressing 
to the Roman of an argument fi'om the Jewish 
standpoint, for it implies a cei'tain community of 
ideas, Avithout which it would be unintelligible. 
That such a community in fact existed is implied 
in the apparition of Judseo-Roman elements in 
subsequent church history. The Pope still wears 



TEE MOULD OF DOGTBINR. li> 

the imperial crown and the title of Pontifex 
Maximus borrowed from pagan Rome, but with 
these assumes the robes and functions of the 
Jewish High-Priest. Cardinal Newman, in his 
sermons, argues that the Church is an imperial 
power, prolonging also the Jewish regime. Lu- 
ther found ^^new wine," indeed, but borrowed 
from Rome her "old bottles" to put it in, and so 
Judaized the Reformation. The Genevan system 
derived its inspiration, by way of Calvin through 
Augustine, from the Latin Theology of North 
Africa: and it culminated in an attempted rees- 
tablishment of the Old Testament Theocracy in 
the New Testament era. 

The historic consilience of these two lines of 
influence in the systems named, and the uni- 
formly coincident occurrence of one of the 
theories of privilege above mentioned (the sacer- 
dotal or corporate, the hereditary, or the sacra- 
mental), suggest something deeper than a mere 
casual connection. Perhaps the battering-ram, 
ostensibly aimed by the Apostle at the distinctly- 
named Jewish bastions of prerogative, but meant 
really for the scarcely-named Roman, may, if 
given full swing, prove equally destructive to the 
work of unnamed theorists who have more 
lately built, of the same material, on the same 
foundations. 



76 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

ANALOGY OF ROMAN TO JEWISH BELIEFS. 

It should be remembered that those ^^ ruling 
ideas in early ages^^ which Canon Mozley has so 
admirably delineated, still survived in Paul's 
time, and in fact, have only slowly receded be- 
fore the advancing pressure of the gospel. Chief 
among these was the notion of right, as the 
creature exclusively of birth, of ceremonial, or 
of law. The individual had indeed not emerged 
into view, as a possessor of rights, or even as a 
subject of thought apart from the corporate life 
of which he was a fractional element. Of this 
wide field, however, there is opportunity only 
hastily to glance at the limited section which 
embraces the question immediately in hand. 

In the Jewish household of Patriarchal times 
lay, yet unseparated, the Family, the Church, 
and the State. The household was itself incor- 
porate in the personality of the Patriarch, of 
which wife, house, son, servant, ox, and ass were 
regarded as in the strict sense the property, 
indissolubly sharing his rights and destiny. The 
punishment of Achan would have been incom- 
plete, had it not extended to all his belongings, 
which were truly parts of him. Subsequently 
the household grew through the tribe to the 
nation, and through the Mosaic Institute was 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 77 

merged into the State, which thereupon absorbed 
all priestly, social, and civic functions. Still, 
however, the individual had no recognition, 
religious or political, except through the high- 
priest, or as incorporated in the ^^ congregation/^ 
The rite of circumcision had been from the be- 
ginning the seal of ancestral rights, and still re- 
mained the badge and guaranty of membership 
in the commonwealth. By its magical power 
even an alien could be ^^ adopted^' into citizen- 
ship, and through a legal fiction counted as a 
home-born child. How completely the Jewish 
conception of prerogative was bounded by polit- 
ical, hereditary, and ceremonial lines, is manifest 
from Paul's words to the Ephesians (2 : 12). 
The uncircumcised Gentile, whatever his per- 
sonal attainments or character, being an ^^ alien 
from the commonwealth of Israel,^' and from 
defect of birth a ^^ stranger from the covenants 
of promise," is accounted as necessarily "having 
no hope, and without God in the world.'' To 
be "cut off from the congregation" was to the 
Jew equivalent to being cut off from life itself. 
Not one of these conceptions could have been 
unfamiliar to the Roman. While stronger em- 
phasis in his scheme lay on the imperial than on 
the hereditary element, yet so complete an 
analogy existed between the Roman and Jewish 



78 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

exaltation of political^ ancestral^ and ceremonial 
right, that the Roman might fairly be called a 
secular Jew. The Fatria Potestas was in full 
force — extending even to the power of life and 
death over the son, whose independent existence, 
even, was not recognized by the law. The loss 
of citizenship, as Ortolan tells us,^ was the loss 
of liberty, and, as the slave was not accounted a 
person, but a thing, amounted to civil extinction. 
^^Adoption'^ was analogous to circumcision, in- 
vesting the stranger with a fictitious kinship, 
through pontifical ceremony.^ Paul knew how to 
make the chief captain ^^ afraid,'^ who had "bound 
him with thongs.^^ ^ After the true Roman spirit 
he appealed, not to his personal innocence, but to 
his political and ancestral claims, for he was "a 
Roman,'^ and that not artificially, for he was 
" free-born.^^ 

PAUL AGAINST THESE BELIEFS. 

Now.it was inevitable that in the mind of 
both Jew and Roman the new idea which Paul 
brought should at first tend to fall into, and take 
form from, the " mould ^^ of their preconception. 
They would identify the Church with the State, 
whereupon membership in the one would follow 

^ History of Roman Law, (London, 1871), p. 607. 
2/6., p. 581. ^ Acts 22: 29. 



THE MOULD OB DOCTRINE, 79 

citizenship in the other. Or they would allot 
its privileges according to hereditary right, reck- 
oning the father^s adhesion to the new order as 
necessarily involving his posterity and investing 
them also with his new relations. The new 
initiatory rite they would be likely to regard as 
a mere outward saci^amentum by which the indi- 
vidual, not born a citizen of the new State or an 
heir of the new race, might be formally incorpo- 
rated therein after the analogy of the Jewish 
circumcision or the Roman adoption. It is evi- 
dent, therefore, why the Apostle lays so much 
emphasis on that rite itself as supplying a new 
^^ mould" of conception, and why he devotes the 
preceding chapter of the Epistle to a preparatory 
dislodgement of the misapprehensions above re- 
ferred to. 

He attacks first the idea of salvation by cor- 
porate relation. Let the Roman boast of his 
share in the majesty of the Empire, and the 
righteousness of his Twelve Tables. These cor- 
porate splendors had not saved individual men 
form the Gehenna of shame and misery depicted 
in that livid first chapter of the Epistle. Let the 
Jew glory in the ^^ election" of Israel, and the 
possession of the divine ^^Ten Words." But 
*^they are not all Israel which are of Israel": 
and though the law be ^^holy, just, and good," 



80 IHE MOULD OF DOCTRIXE. 

not the ^^ hearer'^ thereof but the ^^doer" alone 
is justified. God "will render to every man/^ 
not according to his corporate claims whether he 
be Jew or Gentile^ but " according to his deeds/' 
and by those deeds, his own law being witness, 
"shall no flesh be justified/' 

He turns next to the notion of salvation by 
ceremonial. "Our Rabbins have said/' writes 
Rabbi Menachem, "that no circumcised man 
will see hell." Augustine, who made baptism 
the counterpart of circumcision, taught that both 
were saving rites.^ But Paul declares that 
Abraham was saved before he was circumcised, 
and that circumcision was but the palpable 
"sign" and "seal" of an accomplished fact.^ 
The outward form, therefore, he argues, creates 
nothing, and even as a symbol means nothing 
except there be first a "circumcision of the 
heart." It is plain, therefore, that the over- 
weening confidence of Jew and Roman in the 
thaumaturgic power of rites has no tolerance 
in the Apostle's thought. 

Closely connected with this idea is the further 
notion of hereditary grace through lineal descent. 
This inveterate conceit of the Jews, so diametric- 
ally opposed to the whole genius of Christianity, 

^See Ecclesia., 2: 57. 
^Romans 4: 11. 



TEE MOULD OF DOGTBINE: 81 

and so strangely given a posthumous life in 
modern systems, is assaulted in the New Testa- 
ment from end to end. It is worth noticing that 
the very first mention of the Abrahamic covenant 
in the New Testament is in connection with the 
ordinance of baptism, and involves a distinct 
repudiation of the modern birth-right theory. 
^^ Think not to say within yourselves, We have 
Abraham to our father/^ says John the Baptist to 
the Pharisees who came to be baptized, *^for I 
say unto you that God is able of these stones to 
raise up children unto Abraham." 

Paul here declares the whole theory which 
interprets the Abrahamic covenant "as pert lining 
to the flesh" unsound. Abraham himself was 
justified, not by circumcision "in the flesh," as we 
have seen, nor by incorporation in the Jewish 
commonwealth "according to the flesh," for that 
did not exist in his day. The covenant did not run 
with descent "according to the flesh," for "In 
Isaac shall thy seed be called" while Ishmael :s 
rejected. It could not be limited to Israel alone 
"according to the flesh," for the very name 
Abraham is " father of many nations." He con- 
cludes, therefore, that as Abraham himself was 
saved by faith alone, the covenant inures to all 
" them who also walk in the steps of that faith of 
our father of Abraham, which he had being yet 



82 THE MOULD OF BOCTEINE. 

uncircumcised ; that he might be the father of 
all them that believe^ though they be nc>t circum- 
cised/^ If these apostolic propositions be not seen 
at once clearly to obliterate the foundations of the 
national^ the hereditary, and the sacramental 
theories of the church, it would be vain to seek 
further to elaborate or empliasize them. 

THE CENTRAL, TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY. 

The Apostle now approaches the very heart 
of the Epistle and of Christianity — the doctrine 
which he terms the ^^justification of life '^ (ch. 5: 
18). There is a law anterior to and far deeper 
than the Roman or the Mosaic code, of which 
indeed they are but feeble and fragmentary ex- 
cerpts. Our corporate relation to the universe 
is one of more consequence than to microcosmic 
Rome or Israel, and it depends on our attitude 
toward that law. The true ancestral question, 
also, reaches back, not to Abraham only, but to 
Adam, in w^hom the trend of race destiny was 
established. On the one side of law are sin and 
death — root and fruit; on the other side, in like 
relation, righteousness and life. Justification is 
that rightening with law which effects transition 
from sin to righteousness, and so from death to 
life. Death coming into the world by Adam 
and "passing through to all men^' since, is proof 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTBINE. 83 

conclusive of condemnation^ and disjointing of 
our relations with the universe. Life in the 
risen Christ is equally conclusive of justification 
and a restored citizenship in the commonwealth 
of God. "Christ being raised from the dead, 
dieth no more: death no more hath dominion 
over him." For Christ's is that "better resur- 
rection/^ now for the first time manifest, by 
which he became the ''first-born from the dead'' 
— a birth "new/' not in time only, but as the 
Greek words commonly used imply, "new" in 
kind.^ 

It is evident, therefore, that in Christ's death 
and resurrection we find the analogue of that 
spiritual process through which we too are "jus- 
tified," being "born anew." We are "justified 
by faith," but " he that hath died is justified from 
sin."^ "If any man come unto me . . . and 
hate not his own life also," said our Lord, "he 
cannot be my disciple." As, therefore, our 
Lord "of himself" "laid down his life that he 
might take it again," "being raised again for 
our justification," so faith, not "counting life 
dear unto itself," willingly "surrenders it for 
Christ's sake," that it may "find it" anew in 
him. Fitly, therefore, our Lord's death and 

J See Trench, Synonyms, Part II., (New York, 1868), 
p. 42. '^Romans 6 : 7 [Canterbury Revision). 



84 THE MOULD OF D OCT BINE, 

resurrection and our analogous spiritual new 
birth are jointly symbolized in that act of faith 
in which the believer voluntarily "lays down 
his life^^ also, that he may resume it again, not 
by his own act, but through another hand in 
Christ^s name, as his avowed serv^ant, henceforth 
"to walk in newness of life/^ 

For it cannot be too often reiterated that the 
central idea of baptism is not a meagre and 
imperfect "purification,^^ but that complete and 
marvellous "new birth ^^ which alone made 
PauFs message "a gospel,'^ "the poicer of Grod 
unto salvation to every one that beUeveth: to the 
Jew first, and also to the Greek.'^ The sjTnbolic 
essence of baptism is therefore, according to the 
Apostle's arguments, not the cleansing "applica- 
tion of water,*^ but the "burial'' of that "breath 
which is in man's nostrils" into an element in 
which breath and thereby life is cut oflF, and its 
being raised thence by exterior power. Dean 
Goulburn, of the English Church, tersely puts 
it thus : "Animation having been for one mo- 
ment suspended beneath the waters, a t}^e this 
of the interruption of man's energies by death, 
the body is lifted up again into the air by way 
of expressing emblematically the new birth of 
resurrection."^ ^"e can but join in his expressed 

^ Bampton Lectures (1850), Oxford Edition, p. 18. 



THE MOULD OF BOCTRINE. 85 

^^ regret'^ that ^Hhe form of administration un- 
avoidably (if it be unavoidably) adopted in cold 
climates should utterly obscure the emblematic 
significance of the rite, and render unintelligible 
to all but the educated the Apostle's association 
of burial and resurrection with the ordinance.'^ 
^^AVere immersion universally practiced/' he adds, 
^^ this association of two at present heterogeneous 
ideas would become intelligible to the humblest.'^ 
How "obedience from the heart" to this 
"mould of doctrine'' may give outline to the 
whole (>f the Christian life, Archbishop Cranmer 
tell us after his vigorous manner : " The dipping 
into the water doth betoken that the old Adam 
with all his sin and evil lusts ought to be 
drowned and killed by daily contrition and 
repentance." " The Apostle here teaches," adds 
Bishop Wordsworth, "that the doctrine of our 
new birth in baptism is a practical doctrine, and 
is indeed the root of all Christian practice." ^ 

BAPTISM NOT A PURIFICATION. 

The idea of purification is never in the Ne^v 
Testament explicitly associated with baptism, and 
the term "wash" but once. In that sole in- 
stance it was Ananias' word with reference to 
the baptism of Paul himself. It may b^ j-e- 

1 Commentary on New Testamerit, p. 23Q. 



86 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

marked incidentally that in that case immersion 
was necessarily implied : for the Greek louo, Dr. 
Robinson's New Testament Lexkon being witness, 
is never used except the whole person be involved. 
But it is more significant to notice that the em- 
phasis is laid^ not on washing the man, but 
washing aicay sin; that is to say^ in Cranmer's 
(and also Luther's) phrase, ^^ drowning the old 
Adam/' as the old world was flooded and 
^^yashed away" from ^JvToah. Alluding to 
Noah's case (one of the two tj^pical events of 
the Old Testament to which the term baptism 
is applied in the Xew) Peter distiactly antici- 
pates and repels that false interpretation of the 
ordinance which makes it a mere ^^ putting away 
of the filth of the flesh." Xoah was not 
cleansed by the ^^application of water," nor 
has that ^^ figure" any conceivable "likeness" 
to, or connection with, the "resurrection of 
Christ." He lays emphasis instead on that 
loyal "answer of a good conscience toward 
God" by which Xoah became, as the Epistle 
to the Hebrews phrases it, "the heir of right- 
eousness by faith." His loyalty was manifested 
in the urTliesitating surrender of his life into 
God's hand, to be shut up into an unprecedented 
structure, without rudder, chart, or compass; 
whereupon he sailed through the flood of death 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 87 

to the shores of a new life^ and became^ like 
Christ, in a manner the ^^ first-born of the dead/^ 
^^The like figure (literally ''the antitype'') 
whereunto/' adds the Apostle, ''baptism doth 
now save us ... by the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ." 

Turning to the other Old Testament type 
adduced by Paul, we are told that the redeemed 
people were "all baptized unto Moses in the 
cloud and in the sea." Much childish hilarity 
has been indulged by those who think baptism 
consists in the cleansing "application of water," 
over the seeming incongruity of an "immersion," 
while going over the sea "dry shod," It is not 
difficult to see that such triflers indulge in a bad 
joke at their own expense. For if the Israelites 
were untouched by water, as is implied in the 
narrative, and still were baptized, it is plain that 
baptism cannot be "washing." On the other 
hand, remember that the Children of Israel were 
commanded by Moses in God's name to "go for- 
ward" into the as yet unparted sea, and that they 
boldly surrendered their lives to his word ; and 
so "by faith they passed through the Red Sea as 
by dry land : which the Egyptians assaying to do 
were drowned." "By that act," says Bunsen, 
"history was born;" for by it Israel "passed 
over" from continent to continent, from slavery 



88 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

to freedom^ from the kingdom of Pharoah to the 
kingdom of God. How thoroughly does all this 
harmonize with the figurative language of the 
Epistle to the Romans. They had been ^^ buried ^^ 
as Egj^ptian slaves: they had been ^^ raised ^^ as 
God^s freemen to '' newness of life.^^ They were 
^^ justified ^^ — that is^ completely changed in 
relation^ but not yet '' sanctified ^^ — ^that is, pro- 
gressively changed in character. ^^ Sin " had 
'^ no more ^^ riglitful '' dominion over them/^ for 
they had '^ died '^ to it ; but they were yet so to 
^^ yield their members unto righteousness^^ that 
it should have no real dominion. They were got 
clean out of Egj^t, but Egj^t was yet by slow 
and painful discipline to be got out of them. 
They were '' perfect ^^ as " new-born ^^ babes, but 
not perfect, nor by any further " birth ^' to be- 
come so, as full-grown men. 

Thus it is manifest that into an unbroken 
" mould ^^ Old Testament type, New Testament 
resurrection, and perennial new birth and justifi- 
cation alike fit with an exactness that reveals 
their affinity one wdth another, and links them 
all to an antecedent faith, whose ^' obedience ^^ is 
expressed therein. Symbolically the believer 
thus pictures forth to men the transaction by 
Avhich he has spiritually ^^ passed over'^ from 
•^the law of sin aiid dep-th^^ to the "law of the 



IHE MOULD OF DOCIEINE, 89 

Spirit of life in Christ Jesus/^ wherein^ and 
not wherefrom, he has been ^^made free/^ He 
has died 'Ho sin^^ that he might not die "in his 



CHAPTER yi. 

BAPTISM AND THE NEW BIRTH— PERVERSIONS 
AND THEIR SOURCES. 

WHAT mean ye by this service ?^^ This was 
the question which, as Moses declared, the 
Passover ordinance was expected and intended to 
provoke from successive generations. We may 
gather from the terms employed a significant 
hint of the essential nature and functions of an 
ordinance. It was a ^^ service/^ that is to say, 
something done because commanded, and since 
the ^^ servant is not above his master,^^ done as 
commanded. It had a "meaning,^^ specific and 
intelligible. It Avas God's chosen symbol to 
body forth his chosen thought. To have sub- 
stituted some supposed higher service for exact 
obedience would have been disobedience. King 
Saul tried that, and found a quick passage into 
history, branded with the stinging legend, "to 
obey is better than sacrifice.'^ To have modified 
the symbol as if to express some wiser thought, or 
to express the appointed thought in some wiser 
way, would have been to insinuate indiscretion 

90 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 9i 

in the Omniscient One in not taking earlier 
counsel of the assumed reviser. ^^He that re- 
proveth God, let him answer it/^ 

^^What mean yef^^ said the children to the 
fathers, and this could be easily told and easily 
understood. For so vividly did the appointed 
rite reproduce the salient features of that memo- 
rable time, in which God "passed-over^' sheltered 
Israel, and Israel "passed-over" the sea — ^that 
even the child must recognize the likeness of the 
one in the other. But all that God meant thereby 
neither fathers nor children could as yet tell. No 
— nor can we to whom the ^^ mystery hid from 
the ages'^ has been revealed: for it is a mystery 
that forever ^^passeth knowledge,^' into which 
still even ^^ angels desire to look.'' 

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ORDINANCES. 

This is the common mark of the Divine, in 
ordinance and prophecy, that while simple and 
obvious in their primary import, they hint far 
more than they disclose. So do they in their 
deep-lying principles tap the roots of things — so 
do they continually freshen and deepen them- 
selves in meaning, aptly interpreting new phases 
of fact and feeling, and finding "springing and 
germinant fulfilment'' in growing history — so do 
they by -Subtle alhision touch secret doors apening 



92 TEE JtfOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

into byways of discovery^ as to remind us that 
he who framed the ordinances of the church is 
the same God who also established the ^^ordi- 
nances of heaven.'* Eeverently we watch the 
trial of the perfectness of those heavenly oixii- 
nances, as the planet lays its pulse-beat open on 
the sun. and brings the chronometry of centuries 
to the test of seconds ; and lo I a spider's film is 
not delicate enough to find a margin of variance. 
How more devoutly ought we to study, and rever- 
ently to deal withj those eaithly ordinances meant 
to steady a sublimer pulse-beat and measure the 
are of a longer flighty even that of a soul, whose 
fulfilment of its course is one day to be laid open 
and measured ag^ainst the sun. 

The prophets could not comprehend the full 
meaning of the savinors o^iven them to utter ; all 
the less could they safely dwarf or alter them, 
but they could "'speak God's word faithfully." 
Israel could read the historic, but not the deeper 
prophetic, meaning of the Passover. So far it 
was to them a message sealed. But all the more 
reverently did they guard the sacred mystery, 
and bring it to later ages safe under the un- 
\dolated seal ; thus "' not unto themselves, but imto 
us they did minister'^ a blessing greater than they 
knew. Siu^ely the ordinances of the Xew Testa- 
ment are not nai'rower in range, nor do they 



THE MOULD OF BOGTRINE. 93 

enshrine a mystery less profound, than those of 
the Old. Accordingly our Lord did not lay, 
even upon his Apostles, the delicate and perilous 
task of readjusting as if ill-devised, or ^^ de- 
veloping^^ as if incomplete, appointments om- 
nisciently prepared; nor did he demand even a 
perfect comprehension of the depth and ultimate 
bearing of his commands : he asked only a pos- 
sible and far humbler service, viz., that they 
would ^^keep'^ his "words.^^ The "faithfuP' 
servant in the parable is reckoned also ^Svise.^^ 
For though the '^ servant knoweth not what his 
Lord doeth," he may still borrow of his Lord^s 
wisdom and further his Lord^s end by obeying 
unquestioningly his Lord's command. 

"What mean ye by this service ?'' let us ask 
of Paul, concerning either of Christ's ordinances. 
His answer is unequivocal. Its authority rests 
wholly on Christ's word. He has "received 
from the Lord Jesus" what he has "delivered 
unto" us; and delivered as he received it. The 
ordinances, like the gospel, were given him "in 
trust," and not even "an angel from heaven" 
miglit authorize the violation of that trust, nor 
could he alter without destroying. The primary 
meaning of each ordinance is likewise in Paul's 
teaching palpable. In baptism, to which we 
here especially turn, the historic resurrection of 



94 THE MOULD OF DOCTBINE. 

the Lord is reenacted in outline^ as we have 
seen^ and the analogous spiritual new birth 
thereby symbolized. It emj)ha5izes the fact of 
the resurrection, and the reality of the new birth. 
But beyond this it fastens attention on the old 
question of the disciples, " what the rising from .the 
dead should mean^^: and sets men asking: arain 
with Nicodemus concerning the new birth " how 
can these things be?^^ 

If the sole aim of baptism were to impale 
thoughtless men on these questions, it would be 
no unworthy consummation, nor foreign to the 
central issues of to-day. 



But again we ask those who are sprinkling 
water upon a babe in the name of the Trinity, 
^^What mean ye by this service ?^^ The most 
noticeable feature of the somewhat multitudinous 
and chaotic reply will be that no one ventures to 
turn for authority, as Paul turns concerning 
primitive baptism, to the explicit command of 
Christ. For no one is mad enough to claim that 
our Lord ever by any specific word commanded 
men to be sprinkled, or babes to be in any way 
baptized. The utmost that is claimed is that the 
word used by him was so generically comprehen- 
sive^ and so vague, that by a liberal construction 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 95 

these ideas may be sheltered inclusively under 
the outer edges of its meaning : that baptism is 
not necessarily confined by Scripture to immer- 
sion, nor to adults — only that. The XXXIX. 
Articles of the Church of England say, ^^The 
baptism of young children is in anywise to be re- 
tained in the Church as most agreeable with the 
institution of Christ/^ The Methodist Articles 
more curtly say, '' The baptism of young children 
is to be retained in the Church/' ^ While the most 
recent utterance of all, that of the Reformed 
Episcopal Church, proposes as justifying the re- 
tention of the form, the cautious statement that it 
is '^not contrary to Scripture,'^ and is conformable 
to ^^ ancient usage/' ^ It will be observed that 
all these recognize the institution as existing and 
to be ^^ retained," but there is, in all, significant 
silence as to its origin and credentials ; unless the 
tracing it to ^^ ancient usage" be meant as a return 
with Rome to the sufficiency of tradition. The 
Council of Trent did, indeed, claim that the bap- 
tism of infants was ^^ instituted by our Lord 
Jesus Christ" ; but this was asserted equally of all 
the seven sacraments, and on the authority, not 
of Scripture, but of an alleged Apostolic Tradi- 
tion. Cardinal Bellarmine places among the 

* Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. III. 
2/6., vol. III., p. 820. 



96 THE MOULD OF DOCTRIXE. 

things depending wholly on tradition, because 
not found in Scripture — ^\'ith the perpetual vir- 
ginity- of Mary, the perpetual recurrence of Easter 
on Sunday, and Purgatoiy (which Luther believed, 
yet admitted it could not be found in Scripture) 
— "infant baptism, which is necessary to be 
believed, but neither Romanists nor Protestants 
can prove it from Scripture.'"^ The Romanist 
Mohler adds, that the retention of the custom is 
"utterly incomprehensible, according to the 
Protestant \4ew."' The Anabaptists, he says, 
drew the natm^l conclusion from Luthei^s 
premises, and he was powerless to answer them.^ 
The impression made by this difficulty upon, 
and the share it had in shaping the histoiy of, 
two men alike so splendid in endowment, so 
acute in criticism, so candid and lovable in char- 
acter, as John H. and Francis ^V. Xewman, yet 
ultimately driven wide as the Poles asunder in 
faith, ought not to be overlooked. The dis- 
covery of the spui'iousness of the " decretals ^^ 
and other alleged early documents upon which 
Rome had rested the authority of her traditions, 
had left her without even this g?/<7^/-apostolic 
basis of suppon. All her novelties, their base 

1 Browne, on The Thirty -nine Articles (London, 1865), 
p. 137. 

- :<\jmholism (New Ytrk, Thi.d Edition), p. 208. 



THE MOULD OF BOGTEINE. 97 

being cut away, hung like a mirage in the air, 
ready to vanish. To meet this ^^ difficulty/^ 
John H. Newman broached the ^^ hypothesis/^ 
since so prominent in all discussions of the 
theme, of the "Development of Doctrine/^ ^ 
Protestant writers have been ready to borrow, as 
the sole possible resource in the authentication 
of infant baptism, this theory, which its inventor 
himself regarded as worthless, if it did not vindi- 
cate all the peculiarities of the Romish Church. 
Commenting on that one of the Thirty-Nine 
Articles of his own Church which bears on this 
subject. Principal G. A. Jacob says: Infant bap- 
tism " is not mentioned in the New Testament 
— no instance of it is recorded there — no allusion 
is made to its effects — no directions are given for 
its administration — it is not an Apostolic ordi- 
nance;'^ but he adds: "We find in the New 
Testament the fundamental idea from which it 
was afterwards developed.''^ 

Not so easily did Francis W. Newman dispose 
of this stumbling-block in the way : one of the 
first, as he tells us (in the pathetic history of his 
soul struggles recorded in his Phases of Faith),^ 
to escape which he turned aside from the beaten 

^Development of Christian Doctrine, (London, 1845). 
2 Ecclesiastical Polity of New Testament, p. 2^0 
» (London, 1870), pp. 6, 9, 10. 
G 



98 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

path. Being a candidate for orders in the 
Churchy he was shocked^ on approaching this 
subject, to find baptismal regeneration plainly- 
taught in the Articles, and as plainly evaded by 
clergymen, as it seemed to him, through "shifts 
invented to avoid the disagreeable necessity of 
resigning their functions/' All the defences of 
infant baptism he found to partake of the same 
Jesuitical spirit : involving the attempt to fasten 
upon the Scriptures by insinuation the responsi- 
bility of a custom which could not be directly 
derived from them. " Even if they can be made 
to confirm, they could not have suggested or 
established, it.'' The sharp recoil against dis- 
covered disingenuousness in sacred things in- 
tensified itself into a suspicious temper, grew to 
cynicism, and so he went out into a realm "lonely 
as the desert behind Algiers," where he still 
wanders solitary and uncomforted, while the 
night comes on. 

HOW SPRINKLING IS DEFENDED. 

The practice of sprinkling is equally devoid 
of Scriptural warrant, and carries with it the 
marks of human and — in its extended applica- 
tion — -comparatively modern intrusion. Cere- 
monial corruptions, says Archbishop Whately, 
are " first overlooked, then tolerated, then sane- 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 99 

tioned, and finally embodied in a system; of 
which they are rather to be regarded as the cause 
than the effect/^ ^ When the African Bishop 
Cyprian uttered the hesitating, but amiable sug- 
gestion, that the drenching of the bed-ridden 
convert in water might graciously be accepted as 
confessedly imperfect, but in such case the only 
possible approach to the divine immersion^ — 
probably he little thought an exception based 
upon so timid and casual a venture of opinion 
would one day assume to be the rule, to the 
practical exclusion of the divine order itself. 
Yet through that insignificant breach, the deep 
waters of baptism have shallowed down until 
they are at length reduced to tiny drops trick- 
ling on an infant's forehead. The watermarks 
of this decline are plainly visible, as will here- 
after be shown, in the history of the modification 
of ecclesiastical formularies: the juxtaposition 
of the new and the surviving old producing in 
some cases a sense of incongruity as striking as 
the sight of the baker's loaves and pans set in 
the niches and mixed with the sculptured relics 
of Vesta's temple at Rome. The Methodist 
Discipline, for instance, still solemnly cites the 
traditional warrant for infant baptism, " Except 

^ Errors of Rome, p. 16. 

2 '* Not unlawful." See Cave, Primitive Christianityy 
(Oxford, 1840), p. 150. 



100 THE MOULD OF DOCTEINE. 

a man be born of water/^ etc./^ and then as 
solemnly provides a teaspoonful of water out of 
which the child is to be " born/^ The Anglican 
Ccdechism of 1862 asks the ancient question, 
" What is the outward and visible sign or foi^m 
in baptism ?^^ and returns the answer novel, in 
more senses than one, '''Water: wherein the 
person is baptized/^ ^ According to this, water 
itself is a "mere form^^ and that being non- 
essential, may be dispensed with. 

As to the positive symbolic import of the 
sprinkling of water upon infants under the name 
of baptism, enough has been already said of the 
multiplicity and incompatibility of modern theo- 
ries, to show that no majority vote could prob- 
ably be obtained in favor of any verdict more 
definite than that which the Pharisees rendered 
concerning the origin of John^s baptism, " We 
cannot teil.^^ Nearly all the Churches — to 
quote substantially the language of Dr. John 
Hall, used in another connection, but most ajyro- 
pos here — appeal first to the New Testament: 
if that fails, to the Old Testament : then to anti- 
quity : and finally conclude that no inspired rule 
is given. "So,^^ he says, "loose practice, like 
loose thinking, always seeks to represent the 
standard as indefinite.^^ ^ 

1 Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, p. 521. 

2 Questions of the Day, p. 273, vol. III. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 101 

It is probable, however, that on the negative 
side far greater definiteness and unanimity might 
be reached, in the avowal that baptism does not 
symbolize regeneration by faith. This is logi- 
cally inevitable, whether or not it take the form 
of definite avowal. For literally the sprinkling 
of water in no wise touches the life, or even re- 
motely shadows forth emergence from death into 
life. Theoretically, as applied to infants, it can- 
not imply regeneration by faith, for faith is there 
impossible. It must therefore, in such case, 
either be held to effect regeneration, or to make 
no allusion to it. We reach, therefore, this re- 
markable result : 

AN ENORMOUS CONTRADICTION. 

That baptism, which was in PauFs time im- 
mersion, the visible ^4ikeness of Christ's 
resurrection,^' and the symbol of the believer's 
passage through death to life, may in the nine- 
teenth century equally well be pouring or 
sprinkling, which are alike devoid of every trace 
of such likeness, or of such symbolism; that 
that era-making idea of the new birth — with 
which our Lord startled Nicodemus ; with which 
the Apostles ^^ turned the world upside down"; 
and which has been the inner force of every 
great religious revolution since; which our Lord 



102 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

"writ large ^^ in a symbol chosen by himself and 
set at the forefront of his advancing church — 
may with perfect safety be pushed from its place, 
and the notion of "purification, consecration'' or 
what not, thrust in instead. 

Clearly a baptism which carefully excludes 
from its purport the central thought which Christ 
included, and so refashions the outline of the rite 
as to efface all traces of his design, and adapt it 
to the utterance of the new thought so alien to 
his own, can no longer be Christ's baptism. And 
his word returns again : " Ye have made the word 
of God of none effect by your tradition.^^ 

The enormity of the contradiction reached 
through these perversions, and still maintained 
by those who declare the Bible their " only and 
sufficient rule of faith and practice,^^ is startling. 
The most specious if not the only apology, 
which Protestantism can be said to have pro- 
duced, is the citation of that perilous principle 
which Luther himself suggested — for the pro- 
tection, however, not only of infant baptism, 
but of am^icular confession, penance, and the 
bulk of the Romish innovations;^ and to which, 
as we have seen, the Reformed Episcopal Church 
has just recurred, viz. : that nothing can be per- 
nicious that is sanctified by antiquity and not 

^ Hardwick, History of Thirty-Xine Articles, p. 14. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 103 

explicitly forbidden by Scripture. A moment's 
consideration will show that this is a revision, 
which amounts to rescission^ of the Protestant 
Canon. For it absurdly proposes two ^^only'^ 
rules, Scripture and ancient usage, which, how- 
ever, must not conflict. But conflict is in fact 
inevitable; for ^Hhe restless spirit of man,'' says 
Canon Liddon, "cannot but at last press a 
principle to the real limit of its application, even 
although centuries should intervene between the 
premises and the conclusion." ^ 

Infant baptism, for instance, even if not fairly 
included under the authority of Christ's commis- 
sion, seems at worst only a harmless superfluous 
form, and is often defended on that plea. But 
the very foundation principle of the theory which 
introduces infant baptism compels inevitably the 
claiming of the whole field for it, leaving adult 
baptism, save in heathen nations, exceptional only. 
For if baptism can be of any spiritual service, 
independent of intelligence or volition, it would 
be criminal to neglect or postpone it. That fierce 
old Christian militant who made his motto "bap- 
tism or death " was an evangelist after his way : 
and equally so that enthusiastic Churchman who 
covertly sought to save the Algerian Moslems not 

^ Bamplon Lectures (1866) on the Divinity of Our 
Lord (New York, 1868), p. 484. 



104 THE MOULD OF DOCTBINE. 

long since. Standing at his window with prayer- 
book and watering-pot in hand, he diligently read 
the baptismal service from the one, and fi-om the 
other simultaneously sprinkled the passers-by.^ 
"^ But baptism in unresisting infancy would, 
according to their theory, have been equally 
efficacious, and would have been the normal 
course: for it would have saved the resort to 
force in the one case and to craft in the other.^ 
It is evident, then, that infant baptism and 
believers^ baptism cannot permanently dwell 
together. The parasite, once fairly lodged, will, 
if it be not torn away, drink the life and usurp 
the place of the trunk to which it dings. The 
church, no more than the individual, can ^^ serve 
two masters.^' Scripture or tradition alone must 
be supreme. 

HOW INFANT BAPTISM AROSE. 

As to the antiquity of the rite of infant lustra- 
tion there can be no doubt. Indeed, it might be 
hard to resist for it the claim which one of the 
Romish Fathers has triumphantly brought in 
vindication of the practice of prayers for dead: 
that it was "more ancient than Christianity 

^ Westminster Review, 114 (October, 1880), p. 549. 
2 Curteis, Bampton Lectures, p. 214. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 105 

itself.'^ ^ It was almost the universal custom of 
heathen nations, as Mr. Tylor tells us, to couple 
a religious meaning with the washing and 
naming of the child after birth. The Greeks 
and Romans practised, not only infant baptism, 
but the sprinkling of holy water upon wor- 
shippers, as a purifying symbol.^ 

But when or how the baptism of infants as a 
Christian rite began it is not so easy to say. 
Evil did not first come into the world in the 
manifest garb or with the honest tramp of an 
open foe, but with the gliding of the serpent, 
^' more subtle than any beast of the field.^^ " No 
one,^^ says Archbishop Whately, '' can point out 
any precise period when the Romish corruptions 
began — ^they crept in one by one — ^the natural 
offspring of human passions unchecked.^^ ^ They 
"all grew out of natural and generally praise- 
worthy impulses, as in the case of prayers for the 
dead, supposed to be in purgatory ,^^ according 
to Canon Mozley. But these worthy impulses 
were manipulated constantly to an unworthy 
end, and cannot hallow the rites they confided 
in. In the days when the Roman Republic had 
superseded the Kingdom, but the old kingly 

^ Muller : cited in Barrows' Purgatory (American 
Tract Society, 1882), p. 107. 

^Primitivt Culture, 2 : 430, 439, 441. 
^ Errors of Rome, p. 11. 



106 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

reverence still lingered, ^^ eight ancient kingly 
statues stood in the Capitol. A statue of Julius 
Csesar was placed near these, two years before 
his death, with the covert object of giving him 
kingly honors/^ ^ The statue dumb and motion- 
less seemed innocent, but in fact the snow-white 
marble was dyed deep with an iniquitious intent, 
and the candid sculptor's art suborned to the 
basest of treacheries. 

So, one by one in the second century A. D., 
there crept to the side of the simple rite Christ 
had appointed new ^^ symbolic elements in ac- 
cordance with the taste of the time and the 
poetic genius of the East, especially of the 
Egyptian Church;'^ ^ beautiful, tender, seemingly 
harmless and even helpful. A little later and 
these new features have multiplied, got into the 
foreground, taken on a deep and awful signifi- 
cance. The brotherly minister has become a 
thaumaturgic priest; the simple bread and wine 
under his incantations become the literal body 
and blood of the Lord, exclusion from the taste 
of which, for child or man, is death; the bap- 
tismal water must, equally with the bread and 
wine, be "trans-elemented'' by the pouring in 

^ G. C. Lewis, Credibility of Early Roman History ^ 
(London, 1855), p. 107. 

2 Pressens^, Early Years of Christianity (London, 
1879), p. 4:24. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 107 

of oil ill the form of a cross, the letting down a 
lighted taper until the melted wax had flowed in 
and the light was extinguished, with divers 
other subsidiary rites and multiplied forms of 
words.^ The water thus made ^^loly" of itself 
regenerated all who were plunged therein, and 
nothing else could. Considering the strength of 
parental love and piety, and the preconceived 
unity of parent and child in the popular mind, 
as heretofore explained; considering also the new 
rod of power thereby lodged in priestly hands — 
it LS not wonderful that the baptism of infants 
entered and grew apace. 

When sprinkling and pouring had been first 
introduced as " not unlawful,^^ says Cave in his 
Primitive Christianity, it ^^ quickly succeeded in 
the room of immersion, because the tender bodies 
of most infants (the only persons now baptized) 
could not be put under water in these cold cli- 
mates without prejudice to health, if not to their 
lives.'^^ Wall puts it a little more carefully, 
thus : " It being allowed to weak children to be 
baptized by affusion, many fond ladies and gen- 
tlemen first, and then by degrees the common 
people, would obtain the favor of the priest to 
have their children pass for weak,'^ and so escape 

' Cf. Cowles ill Bib. Sac, vol. XXXIII., p. 426. 
^Primitive Christianity, p. 156. 



108 THE 3I0ULD OF DOCTRINE. 

dipping.^ It is noticeable that immersion did 
not at once sink into sprinkling. ^^In 1645/^ 
says Wall, " when dipping ceased, there was no 
sprinkling, but pouring only/^ He quotes Vas- 
quez as saying that "sprinkling (as compared 
with pouring) cannot be practised Avithout sin/^ ^ 
How sprinkling itself first got a footing as bap- 
tism is not clear. Exorcism, which always 
accompanied baptism in the early church, in- 
volved the sprinkling of holy water. It is quite 
possible, as has been maintained by some, ^ that 
this was afterwards confounded with baptism; 
and that the custom of sprinkling to-day is the 
"survivaP^ of a superstitious charm to drive 
away the Devil: which it were to be devoutly 
wished, though quite unlikely, that it may do. 

The conclusion is obvious. No antiquity, 
however hoary, can change earthly things to 
heavenly. No silence of Scripture, however 
profound, can be taken as a license for the intru- 
sion of human device into rites that are divine: 
and such intrusion can bring only evil. Man, 
powerless to create, is mighty to destroy. Even 
in the Apostles^ time the "mystery of lawless- 
ness^^ had begun to work, and the sanction of 

1 History of Infant Baptum, p. 717. 
2/5., p. 719. 
8 /&,, p. 723. 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTRIJSE, 109 

the Fathers is weaker still. There is "but one 
lawgiver'^ — not Wesley^ nor Calvin, nor Augus- 
tine, nor Cyprian, nor even Paul, but Christ the 
Lord. " What he saith unto you, do it/^ 



CHAPTER VII. 

BAPTISM AND THE NEW BIRTH— RESULTS OF 
PERVERSION. 

RESULTS, in history and nature, are often 
remote from, di^^proportionate to, and in 
themselves unlike, their causes. The links that 
bind them are likewise frequently delicate and 
obscure. It may easily happen, therefore, that 
the suggestion of such intimacy of relation will 
at first awaken a sense of surprise, or even of 
incredulity — ^the connection, though real, not be- 
ing at once obvious. Nothing could perhaps 
seem more incongruous than the attributing the 
local persistence of red clover, by Mr. Darwin, 
to the presence of cats. ^ But the absurdity dis- 
appears when we are reminded that the prolonged 
life of the clover depends on its fertilization by 
the humble bee; that the bee cannot survive the 
destruction of its comb and nest, and that these, 
which the mice would destroy, the cats, by ex- 
terminating the mice, protect. Thus often a 
most delicate thread of connected circumstance 

1 Origin of Species (New York, 1883), p. 57. 
110 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. Ill 

once grasped will lead us to the centre of the 
labyrinth, and change our embarrassment to sur- 
prise. 

Doubtless the connection of cats with clover 
will seem to the casual observer quite as de- 
monstrable as that, for instance, of a perverted 
baptism with the current evolution philosophy. 
Nevertheless, a patient fumbling among the ad- 
jacent facts may touch a clew leading to the 
revelation of a real kinship. 

THE TESTIMONY OF THOLUCK. 

Nowhere has the grosser Evolutionism found 
a more congenial air or a better prepared soil 
than in the field that Luther ploughed. Indeed, 
so rampant has been the growth of thorns and so 
abundant the crop of tares in that region since 
his day, as to suggest that the ^^ enemy ^^ may in- 
sidiously have broken off the point of his plough, 
80 that it did not go deep enough, or thrust some 
tares into the seed-bag while he was still sowing. 
According to Dr. Charles Hodge,^ " in the com- 
mon Protestant theory, no judgment is expressed 
or implied by the church, in receiving any one, 
as to the fact of his regeneration/' for it is ^^ not 
the purpose of God that the visible church on 
earth should consist exclusively of the regenerate.^' 

^ SysUmatic Theology, vol. III., p. 545. 



112 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

In proof of this he cites the parable of the 
"wheat and tares/^ But if^ as he maintains, the 
" field ^^ in that parable be the church, and the 
"tares" the unregenerate, the scope of the Mas- 
ter's directions to his servants is somewhat 
enlarged by implication. For they were only 
forbidden to usurp the " angels' " functions by 
"pulling up'' the tares, but it seems they may 
without hinderance take on them the "enemy's'^ 
work of planting them. How thoroughly this 
has been done in Lutheran Germany let the ven- 
erable Professor Tholuck tell. " I regret nothing 
so much," said he to Joseph Cook,^ "as that the 
line of demarcation between the church and the 
world which Jonathan Edwards and Whitefield 
drew so deeply in the mind of New-England is 
almost unknown, not to the theological doctrines, 
but to the ecclesiastical forms of Germany. With 
us confirmation is compulsory. Children of un- 
believing as well as of believing families must at 
an early age be baptized and profess faith in 
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Without a 
certificate of confirmation in some Church, em- 
ployment cannot be lawfully obtained. After 
confirmation, the religious standing is assumed to 
be Christian : after that, we are all church mem- 
bers. Thus it happens that in our State Church 
1 Bih. Sac, vol. XXXII., p. 740. 



THE MOULD OF DOC TRINE, 113 

the converted and unconverted are mixed pell- 
mell together/' In a note Mr. Cook adds that " in 
a few cities of North Germany infamous licenses 
were granted w^omen for an infamous purpose, 
but only on exhibition of a certificate of confirm- 
ationJ^ Of the analogous evil results of infant 
baptism in New-England, Mr. Joseph Cook, who 
is himself a Congregationalist, has borne the most 
courageous and trenchant testimony. It led, (he 
says in substance, in his lectures on " Orthodoxy,^') ^ 
to the ^^ half-way covenant,'^ and that to skepti- 
cism. He affirms, on the authority of Tracy, 
that all the churches not following Edwards and 
Whitefield in their revolt against unregenerate 
church-membership became Unitarian.^ Infant 
baptism, imported from the Old AVorld, laid the 
foundation of a State Church in New-England. 
Roger Williams, he adds, protested that it would 
lead to the secularization of church-membership; 
which it in fact did, and out of this secularization 
grew the weakness of New-England against 
French infidelity.^ 

UNITARIANISM AND ITS ORIGIN. 

The history of New England Unitarianism is 
doubtless familiar, but it is perhaps not so well 
known that infant baptism was responsible for 

1 p. 280. 2 p. 281. 3 pp^ 271, 272, 281. 

H 



114 THE MOULD OF DOGTBINE. 

its origination, as well as its modern revival. 
The name itself, according to Bodd, one of their 
early historians, was not derived from antipathy 
to the doctrine of the Trinity as their character- 
istic tenet, but from the union of all parties 
(including the Orthodox) at their instance, in a 
bond of religious toleration, under the name of 
uniti or unitarii. When the rest receded from 
this, the name attached to them alone.^ The 
first propounder of Unitarianism, says Rees, was 
Cellarius. In the beginning of the sixteenth 
century, he was appointed by the Reformers to 
defend infant baptism against the Anabaptist 
leaders. Being overpowered by their arguments, 
he repudiated infant baptism not only, but went 
further and denied the Trinity. That this was 
no legitimate outgro^vth of Anabaptism itself, 
however, is historically certain; for in 1546 
Adam Pastor was excluded from their body for 
holding Unitarian views.^ But the intensity of 
the revulsion, which led to the supreme exalta- 
tion of reason, and the consequent rejection of 
the mystery of the Trinity, is not inexplicable 
when we remember to what stultiloquence the 
Reformers had descended in justifying infant 

^ Rees, Racovian Catechism (London, 1818), Preface 
lY. 
2/&., YIL 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 115 

baptism. Luther said, for instance, as follows: 
" The Anabaptists pretend tliat children, not as 
yet having reason, ought not to receive bap- 
tism. I answer that reason in no way con- 
tributes to faith. Nay, in that children are 
destitute of reason, they are all the more fit and 
proper recipients of baptism. For reason is the 
greatest enemy that faith hath. . . Faith comes 
of the word of God, when this is heard: little 
children hear that word when they receive bap- 
tism, and therewith they receive faith.'^^ Bap- 
tism Jiaving been thus reduced to magic, and 
faith, for its sake, identified with unreason, the 
Unitarians rejected both. Their Racovian Cate- 
chism is largely devoted to an arraignment of 
infant baptism and sprinkling as unscriptural — 
one of the most complete anywhere to be found.^ 

Luther's geeat inconsistency. 

It is the more remarkable that Luther did not 
revolt against infant baptism, when we remember 
his sharp antipathy to Papal usurpation, and 
also that the immediate occasion of the Reforma- 
tion was the sale of indulgences. For infant 
baptism was manifestly, as Dean Milman terms 
it, one of the ^^ strong foundations of sacerdotal 

^Luther's Table Talk (Philadelphia, 1868), p. 202. 
^Eees, Racovian Catechism^ p. 253, seq. 



116 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

power;" ^ and the sale of indulgences Avas its 
direct outgroAAi:li. For the very notion of indul- 
gence, with that of penance and purgatory, 
depends on the assumed loss of baptismal grace 
by after-lapse into sin, the effects of which w^ere 
thus to be averted. But the idea of regenerating 
virtue in baptism, again, arose, as we have seen, 
in connection with infant baptism, inferentially 
interpreted as made efficacious by ^Hransele- 
mentation " of the water (an idea still surviving 
in the ritual of the English and the Methodist 
Churches in the prayer that " this water may be 
sanctified," etc.) " Because the taint of our birth 
is purified by baptism," says Origen, ^^ therefore 
infants are baptized." It is obvious that the 
damnation of infants not so purified, logically 
follows, even were it not distinctly asserted by 
the Fathers, as it was. Even good Dr. Emmons, 
in a later day, only softened this inevitable 
corollary by hopefully surmising, with Dr.AVatts, 
that they might be annihilated.^ They are still 
ominously excluded by the English Church from 
burial in consecrated ground. Infant com- 
munion was also early practised : it being con- 
sistently held, with Augustine, that mystic food 

^ History of Latin Christianity, (London, 1857), vol. 
III., p. 277. 
2 Works, vol. II., p. 651. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 117 

was as essential to the maintenance as mystic 
birth to the inception of spiritual life.^ 

Thus through the misinterpretation and mis- 
application of baptism had faith been changed to 
superstition, and the shadow of priestly power 
been projected over the whole range of life from 
the cradle to the grave, and even into the in- 
visible beyond. Claiming to hold the " keys of 
heaven'' through the sacraments, the priesthood 
had tyrannically gone on to "bind heavy bur- 
dens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on 
men's shoulders," which they themselves would 
not "move with one of their fingers." 

Out of this region of tradition, with its hidden 
reefs, disordered compasses, and baffling winds, 
Luther set sail into the open sea of God's w^ord, 
laying a straight course along the line of "justi- 
fication by faith alone." But unhappily, reaching 
the subject of baptism, he at length fell "into a 
place where two seas met" — and from that ship- 
wreck, only " on boards and broken pieces of the 
ship" have men since "escaped safe to land." 
To drop the figure, Luther left his people a 
priceless legacy in an honestly-translated Scrip- 
ture, in the assertion of its sole authority, and in 
the doctrine that faith alone justifies. But to 
this last and vital doctrine he unhappily ap- 

^ Ecdesia., Second Series, p. 59. 



118 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

pended, as the only recourse for the defence of 
infant baptism, the neutralizing qualification, 
^M^ut baptism alone regenerates.'^ Thus divorc- 
ing baptism from faith, and regeneration from 
justification, he subniiued to his critical and 
sagacious countrymen a conception of Christian 
doctrine hopelessly paradoxical, ^"e must obey 
the Bible asrainst tradition, he said: and vet he 
endorsed sprinkling as substituted by tradition, 
for immersion as commanded (according to his 
o^n translation) in the Bible. He insisted that 
the people must read the Bible for themselves, 
because intelligence is the basis of faith : yet 
contended that the faith of infants is superior 
because unintelligent. He argued that salvation 
is inward and not outward, and therefore ]>eyond 
priestly control : yet hy hanging regeneration 
upon baptism made the inward the creature of 
the outward, and still dependent on another's 
whim. The moulding power of a \isible act 
upon thought and its expression is manifest in 
the fact that the uniform connection of Lutlier's 
word tavjen, to dip, with the practice of sprink- 
ling, has in fact gradually subverted the meaning 
of the word itself. So that the American Bible 
Society maintains its consistency in publishing 
Luther's translation including that word, because 
it has now come to mean ^^ sprinkle." If now 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 119 

the Rationalist claims Luther's authority for the 
proposition that Christianity demands the re- 
nunciation of reason as the condition of faith, it 
will not be easy to answer him. If, finally, 
the Naturalistic Evolutionist suggest that the 
"theory of the potency of every form of life in 
matter'' ought not to seem novel or incredible 
to one who already accepts the idea of spiritual 
birth as the product of material baptism, it may 
at least freshen our curiosity concerning the 
whole matter, and suggest a more careful re- 
vision of the words of Christ and the signifi- 
cance of his ordinance in this connection. 

SCRIPTUEAL BAPTISM AND THE NEW BIRTH. 

That ordinance, as we have seen, in Paul's 
conception symbolically and visibly reenacts the 
spiritual transaction which Christ calls the new 
birth. The Scriptural primacy and fertility of 
that idea have been already insisted on. "It is,'^ 
says Professor Austin Phelps, " one of the oon- 
structive ideas of inspiration, which are not so 
much here or there as everywhere. It is perva- 
sive, like the life blood in the body. It is like ca- 
loric in the globe." ^ The Old Testament begins 
with " the book of births" — speaking significantly 
of the "generations of the heavens and the earth," 

1 The Xew Birth (Boston, 18G7), p. 21. 



120 THE MOULD OF DOVTMINE, 

and "of man ^^ — and of the "bringing forth '^ by 
the earth and the waters, of grass, herb, and living 
creature. The New Testament begins with the 
"generation of Jesus Christ/^ which although 
"from David according to the flesh ^^ and so in 
the old order, was likewise a " new birth ^^ — a 
birth "from above ^^ — a birth of "the Spirit." 
His discourse with Nicodemus pivots itself on the 
same idea, on w^hich also the whole New Testa- 
ment henceforth turns. 

It is a notable instance of the perverse industry 
with which Christ's words have been twisted 
from their aim, that one verse (John iii. 5,) of this 
most prescient discourse, has not only been robbed 
of its deep suggestiveness, but actually so in- 
verted as to seem to defend the very idea it was 
meant to destroy. For, as Wall says, all the 
ancient Christians understand it to refer to bap- 
tism, Calvin being the first to deny it. By 
which denial, adds Wall, he has done " ten times 
more prejudice" to infant baptism (involving, as 
it must, baptismal regeneration) than by "all his 
new hypotheses and arguments;" the Baptists 
having already seized upon it as confirming their 
views.^ 

But that regeneration is, in any case, inde- 
pendent of baptism, is distinctly taught in the 

^ ffistory of Infant Baptism, pp. 551, 552. 



THE MO ULD OF DOC TEINE, 121 

same chapter (verse 36). Surely he that ^^hath 
everlasting life^' is regenerate, and this is affirmed 
of him "that believeth/^ As to the verse itself 
it may be incidentally remarked that, the article 
being absent, it is doubtful whether the Holy 
Spirit is here referred to. In the Armenian and 
many earlier versions, the passage reads literally, 
"of water and of spirit ^^^ — the preposition be- 
coming thus generic, and perhaps alluding to 
certain most significant facts in the physical 
order, and not to baptism at all. But there is 
no room to enlarge upon or even to explain 
this hint. 

What is unmistakably to the purpose is the 
fact that our Lord's whole discourse is manifestly 
aimed, not to encourage, but to beat down the 
too gross and mechanical notions of Nicodemus. 
His first word was anti-materialistic. It in- 
sisted on a birth "from above,'' impliedly as 
against one from beneath. In answer to Nico- 
demus' obtuse suggestion of a possible allusion 
to earthly rebirth he makes the antithesis still 
more distinct, uttering a protest which cannot be 
too deeply pondered in our day against the pos- 
sible evolution of the spiritual out of the mate- 

iSo in Syriac, Slavonic, Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Persian, 
etc. See Malan, on Gospel of John (London, 1865), Note, 
p. 42, 



122 IHE MOULD OF DOQ TRINE. 

rial. ^^That which is born of the flesh is flesh; 
and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit/^ 
To suppose that the intervening verse was meant 
to teach precisely the opposite, and to press upon 
Nicodemus a formalism which was already a snare 
to him, would be absurd. It does not identify, 
but distinguishes, water-birth and spirit-birth; 
and makes the latter not dependent on, but inde- 
pendent of, the former, and urges it as the one 
newly revealed and essential necessity. 

EVOLUTION FALLACIES ANTICIPATED. 

This sharply defined parting off of the mate- 
rial from the spiritual realm, and the assertion 
of the powerlessness of the lower to transcend 
its limits, are suggestive in many directions. 
They point back to that signal break in the 
order of creation when it reaches man, as re- 
corded in Genesis. Though ''- formed,^^ like the 
rest of the animal creation, '' from the dust of 
the ground,^^ that is, from beneath, he alone re- 
ceived from above the breath of God, and 
became thereby a "new creature.'^ Of whom 
Professor Huxley says, "Whether from them 
(that is, the animal creation) or not, he is not 
assuredly of them,^^ "being the only consciously 
intelligent denizen of the world.' ^ We remem- 

^ Evidence of Man's Place in Nature, p. 110. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 123 

ber likewise that unique element in the Incarna- 
tion which severed it from all anterior human 
births: by virtue of w^hich Jesus said to the 
Jews, '' Ye are from beneath, I am from above/^ 
It is not accidental, therefore, but by logical con- 
sequence, that a rejection of the doctrine of 
regeneration is usually accompanied by a denial 
of the Incarnation and the Deity of Christ. 
Not less significant is Paul's claim of authority 
for his words as emanating, not from a superior 
human, but from a superhuman source — a differ- 
ence of kind, and not of degree only: for he 
declared himself "an apostle, not of men, neither 
by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the 
Father, who raised him from the dead/' Thus 
carefully are the discrete lines between the 
"flesh'' and the "spirit," and their respective 
possibilities emphasized in Scripture. The bar- 
riers are thus set against the intrusion of any 
"Monistic" theory in the interpretation of 
Christianity or life, by which the boundaries of 
Genius and Inspiration, Natural and Supernatu- 
ral, Matter and Force, Body and Spirit, and the 
like, may tend to be effaced; the lines of the 
symmetric universe melting thus into the chaotic 
haze of Agnosticism. 

Again, great emphasis is laid in Scripture on 
the transitional element in birth. "Flesh" can- 



124 TUB MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

not be developed^ or disciplined^ or reconstructed 
into "spirit/' For birth is not to be confounded 
with growth: the latter is a process^ protracted, 
continuous, uniform, incomplete : the former is a 
transaction, sudden, interruptive, spasmodic, com- 
plete. The "old man'' must die that the "new 
man" may be born. But death is not annihila- 
tion, nor birth creation, of the mechanism of 
life. The babe dies as to the foetal, that it may 
enter the atmospheric, life: this necessitates no 
modification of structure, but only a transfer of 
the dynamic centre of vitality. The "new 
creature " in Christ is simply one the gravitative 
centre of w^hose life has been changed from the 
"flesh" to the "spirit." 

The great truth which feeds the mills of phil- 
osophy to-day with much grain and more chaff, 
and from which most heterogeneous grists are 
being ground, lies close by. It is that the secret 
of the universal order is vital, not mechanical; 
and that a "new thing" can arrive upon the 
earth only through the gateway of birth. 

"We are apt to speak vaguely sometimes," 
says Thoreau, "as if a divine life were to be 
grafted onto or built over this present as a 
suitable foundation. This might do if we could 
so build our own old life as to exclude from it 
all the warmth of our affection, and addle it, as 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 125 

the thrush builds over the cuckoo's egg and lays 
her own atop, and hatches only that; but the 
fact is — so there is the partition — we hatch them 
both, and the cuckoo's always by a day first, and 
that young bird crowds the young thrushes out 
of the nest. No! destroy the cuckoo's egg or 
build a new nest." ^ 

There is still another significant element in 
this connection, vividly illustrated, as are those 
already noticed, in the resurrection and equally 
in baptism, to which Paul refers as its analogue. 
It is that the new birth is not self-wrought. 
Christ's resurrection power did not issue from 
his dead body, much less from the grave — he 
"was raised" by power from above. The im- 
mersed believer does not resume life of himself; 
he too "is raised" by a lifting hand. The old 
schoolmen were not w^holly ignorant of or in- 
different to that series of phenomena which un- 
derlie the modern theory of evolution. They 
preferred, however, the more expressive term 
eduction, as indicating a power leading from 
before, rather than pushing from behind. The 
word "evolution" is logically colorless in itself. 
It becomes theistic or atheistic according as it 
recognizes the "hand reaching through nature 
moukling man," or reverts to the old Lucretian 

^ Letters, (Boston, 1865), p. 42 



126 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

thesis that ^^ Nature is able to produce all things 
of herself, without the intervention of the gods/^ 
Thus, in the nineteenth century of research 
and speculation, the world finds itself sitting 
opposite the same central idea with which our 
Lord taught men to begin in the first. That 
primary ordinance, which Christ provided as 
the corner-stone of organization in his church, 
into which the true doctrine of the new birth 
was visibly cut, has been marred, defaced, and 
thrust aside by the builders, until the idea itself 
has been perverted, obscured, or lost. In its 
stead therefore comes the specious counterfeit: a 
religion whose Bible is ^^ evolved ^^ out of human 
literature; its Christ out of social progress or a 
mythic tendency; and its inner life out of 
culture, inheritance, or good nature; and a 
science with the legend, " That which is born of 
the flesh is spirit.'^ " Ye must be born from 
below.^^ 



CHAPTER VIII. 

BAPTISM AND LOYALTY—THE HISTORIC IDEA, 

THERE is a great future for you Baptists/^ 
once said Neander. The prophecy will in 
many quarters be met only with a shrug of sur- 
prised incredulity. Perhaps it may kindle a 
gentle smile of derision even upon the features 
of one whose 

" Arched brow pulled o'er his eyes 
With solemn proof proclaims him wise " ^ 

— a mute and modest confession of his own con- 
sciously superior profundity as contrasted with 
the superficiality of the simple-minded old 
German. For he has penetration enough to 
assure himself that the Baptist function is (as has 
been conspicuously published not very long ago) 
the ^^ prolonging a conscientious and useless con- 
troversy ^^ over " not even an ordinance, but the 
external method of its administration^'^ — (what 
the internal method might be does not appear) — 

J Churchill. 

' H. W. Beecher, Life of the Christ vol. I., p. 226. 

127 



128 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

thus fighting for ^^an externality of an extern- 
ality/^ and becoming the elect apostle of formal- 
ism^ stupidity^ and self-will. He is further 
confident that this eccentric " externality ^^ consti- 
tutes, as the very name Baptist implies^ his whole 
theological stock in trade: that it is his shibboleth 
for the gate of heaven^ his sermonic '' harp of a 
thousand strings/^ his compendious religion. Is 
he not, therefore, rather an anachrc^nism — a be- 
lated mediaeval ghost who must soon retire before 
the sun? 

It may be deferentially suggested to such a 
critic, in passing, that as a criterion of character 
or doctrine no ^^externality of an externality^^ 
is more likely to be deluding than a name. 
Judged solely by that standard, the '^ Reformed " 
people ought once to have been dissolute, the 
^^ Methodists'^ ought to be characteristically prim 
and cold-blooded, and the ^^Congregationalists" 
and ^* Sabbatarians^' ought to be recognized as 
having a peculiar purchase on the better land, 
because there alone "congregations ne'er break 
up and Sabbaths have no end." 

The profundity of the logic which gauges the 
breadth of the issue by the size of its occasion — 
as if the value and dimensions of an estate were 
dependent on the acreage of the parchment con- 
veying it — is also worthy of a moment's gaze. 



THE MOULD OF BOOT BINE, 129 

The question of baptism, it is said, is only one 
of mensuration — a little more water, or a little 
less — and pertinacity about such a trifle reduces 
Christianity itself to a trifle. By the same 
rule, American liberty is ^^ reduced ^^ to the 
right to use unstamped paper, about which 
^Hrifle" our fathers were somewhat perverse; 
Mohammedanism was by the Sepoy rebellion 
revealed to be only an aversion for greased car- 
tridges : and PauFs religion was summed up in 
an obstinate and somewhat paradoxical refusal 
to circumcise Titus, while consenting to circum- 
cise Timothy. 

In fact, great doors usually swing on small 
hinges. The pass of Thermopylae may be 
narrow, but it cradled and kept the life of 
Greece. The great battles of the world have 
grown out of circumstances often grotesquely 
diminutive and commonplace, such as the refusal 
to doff* a cap, or tlie belching out of an impet- 
uous word; but the results and the principles 
involved have not been therefore insignificant. 
These battles, moreover, however large the 
territory involved, have been fought, not over 
broad areas chiefly, but along narrow border 
lines. The engineer docs not much dread a 
locomotive leap to the track ten feet away, but 
he is cautious of the switch points. 

I 



130 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

THE GROUND OF NEANDER^S SAYING. 

But we climb again to Neander. He was not 
a Baptist. He was not a novice, nor an en- 
thusiastj but a ripened and sedate student and 
observer. He saw things, not under the dazzling 
glare of the passing noon, but in the calm light 
of the centuries. His utterances were not those 
of the flippant paragrapher, but of the cautious 
and philosophic historian, and are entitled there- 
fore to a respectful hearing and pondering, 
Neander dwelt in a time and place of peculiar 
political and intellectual eifervescence and tran- 
sition. The ancient despotism in Church and 
State had drifted (to borrow a striking figure 
from Froude) like icebergs into a warmer sea, 
where, steadily melting away beneath, they must 
soon topple headlong and be dissolved. The 
^^ signs of the times'^ augured the speedy mastery 
of that principle which his countryman Ger- 
viniis summarized^ as ''freedom^ or the right to 
pay submission to nothing but law: and equality , 
the duty of all alike to obey one and the same 
law.'' In all this Neander could but recognize 
a divine pressure on the individual soul, causing 
it to break out of its cerements: he could but 

^ Ifitrodudzon to tlisiory of the Nineteenth Century, 
p. 67. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 131 

hear a divine voice saying to men, " Loose him 
and let him go/^ 

Equally portentous were the phenomena on the 
intellectual side. Enlarged area, multiplied mate- 
rial, improved apparatus, sharpened methods, had 
made the critical school exigent and audacious. 
Nothing was too recondite, too fixed, too an- 
cient, too sacred, for their prying and ransack- 
ing spirit. On every side the iconoclastic hammer 
was ringing, the hungry white-hot ftirnace was 
bellowing, and eager pincers feeding it with 
institutions, customs, traditions, documents, to be 
tested and refined or consumed. Nor was this 
inexplicable. No sooner was the daughter of 
Jairus aroused than it was commanded that 
"something should be given her to eat.^^ The 
awakened soul is always hungry. He who is 
set free to act must also be set free to inquire, 
that he may know how to act. One of the 
most stirring trumpet-calls of the Reformation 
was that sentence of Luther's, in a letter prefixed 
to his Treatise on Christian Liberty, wherein he 
repudiated restraint in interpreting the w^ord of 
God, which, inculcating liberty, must be itself 
free. This sentence, says Eoscoe,^ exploded 
Leo's Bull of Excommunication against him. 
Doubtless it did much more. It caused that 
> Life of Leo X, (Bohn, 1847), vol. II., p. 214. 



132 THE MOULD OF DOCTBIJSIE. 

spark to be dropped in the ready tinder, and the 
Cyclopean furnace to be kindled into which the 
Pope himself, with his bull, his tiara, and all his 
belongings must go beside the word of God, to 
be ^^ tried by fire.'^ Neander believed with 
David that already " the words of the Lord are 
pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of 
earth, purified seven times.'^ He could not 
doubt, therefore, that while human incrustations 
must crumble and waste aw^ay in the refining 
flame, the divine word itself w^ould come forth 
clean and lustrous. 

Luther's peophecy historically realized. 

Out of the conjoint tendencies of his time, 
therefore, he saw a principle emerging and soon 
to be dominant, viz. ; The unfettered loord for the 
unfettered souL But this, the prophetic idea for 
the coming era, he found to be the identical hiss- 
toriG idea at the roots of that movement then 
and still contemptuously stigmatized in his own 
country as Anabaptist. "The origin of this 
sect,'^ says Professor Butler, of the Episcopal 
Church, ^ " is very obscure. The name was 
extended to persons of very diiferent origin and 
of various opinions.'' "Some came," he adds, 
"from the "Waldenses and Petrobrusians,'^ 

^ Ecclesiastical History (Philadelphia, 1872), p. 232. 



TRE MOULD OF BOCTBINE. 133 

4he secret disciples of Wiclif, 
Hiiss, and others." "The general views in 
which they agreed were^ that the visible church 
should consist only of holy persons; that nothing 
of human device should be admitted into its 
order or worship: and that infants were not 
proper subjects of baptism." It is deeply signi- 
ficant to find the names of the Waldenses, Wiclif, 
and Huss, coupled by an impartial hand with 
the origin of this movement and these ideas. 
For of Peter Waldo^ says Mrs. Ranyard, ^ " It 
is certain that the Christian world is indebted to 
him for the ^irs^ translation of parts of the Scrip- 
tures into a modern tongue, after the Latin 
ceased to be a living language. . . . The prepa- 
ration of their (the Waldensian) pastors for the 
ministry consisted in learning by heart the Gos- 
pels of Matthew and John, all the Epistles, and 
most of the writings of David, Solomon, and 
the prophets." They were " Biblical Anti-Sacer- 
dotalists," says Milman,^ whose "great strength 
was in the vernacular Scripture," who denied 
"all sacraments, except Baptism and the Eucha- 
rist," and whose martyrdom was for "preaching 
without authority." To this "voice crying in 
the wilderness" more than three hundred years 

1 Tlie Book and its Story (Phila., 1854), pp. 124, 126. 

2 Latin Christianity (London, 1857), vol. lY., p. 98. 



134 THE MOULD OF BOG THINE 

before Luther, Bishop Newton attributes these 
words: ^^In articles of faith, the authority of the 
Holy Scripture is the highest: and for that 
reason it is the rule of judging: so that what- 
soever agreeth not with the word of God is de- 
servedly to be rejected and avoided. The read- 
ing and knowledge of the Scripture is free and 
necessary for all men, the laity as well as the 
clergy. Ceremonies manifestly hindering the 
teaching and learning of the word are diabolical 
inventions.'^ As to Wiclif, it is scarcely neces- 
sary to be reminded that he was for the four- 
teenth century in England what Waldo had 
been for the twelfth on the Continent. "He 
gave the whole Bible to the people, he gave it 
without note or comment, and he was the first 
man that did so.'' ^ Upon him the friars vented 
their maledictions, because by his translation 
"the gospel pearl was cast abroad and trodden 
under foot of swine, and the gospel which Christ 
had given to be kept by the clergy was now 
made forever common to the laity." ^ John 
Huss again in the fifteenth century, and in 
Bohemia, was the champion and martyr of 
Wiclif 's doctrines ; among them, as specified and 
condemned by Pope Pius II. pre-eminently this: 

1 The Booh and Its Story, p. 134. 
2/&., p. 133. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 135 

that " every one hath free liberty to preach the 
word of God/ Thus was the torch of an un- 
fettered word passed on from darkened century 
to century^ until the morning dawn of the Re- 
formation. 

FREEDOM, CIVIL ANP INTELLECTUAL, 
DEMANDED. 

The historic connection of freedom of action 
with the uncovering of the word of God is no 
less manifest than that of freedom of inquiry. 
^' If the foundations of freedom (that is, civil free- 
dom) were laid in religion,'' says Gervinus,^ 
there would be no fear concerning its progress. 
Machiavelli was aware of this truth when he 
looked for a fundamental regeneration of the 
times and of States only in a reform of the 
Church.'' ^^In Luther's time," he adds,^ "when 
the first foundations of liberty were only in the 
act of being laid, the scheme for the whole future 
edifice was sketched by some few who had already 

determined on its immediate completion 

Among the religious enthusiasts, a few, under the 
name of Inspirati or Anabaptists, had conceived 
the idea of a purification of Christianity and its 
forms, according to the dictates of reason; an 

^ Introduction to History of Nineteenth Century, p. 26. 
2 Ih., p. 28. 



136 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

idea which was onlv realized in the days of their 
great-grandchildren^ whose expatriated mission- 
aries found a home in America.'' He further 
instances as especially remarkable their ^^ appeal 
to a di^-ine right (the natural rights of man, as 
they were afterwards called) ; the foundation 
of Church and State on an idea, on a univei-sal 
and natm-al right, which was urged in opposition 
to the vexatious pri\41eges of the few, and of 
castes/'^ Voltaire, who had few soft words to 
bestow on religionists of any sort, and who knew 
of the Anabaptists chiefly from their executionei^, 
who ^^ showed them about in cages as wild beasts 
are shown, and caused their flesh to be torn off 
with red-hot pincers,^' declares that the "manifesto 
published by these savages in the name of the men 
who till the earth might have been signed by 
Lycurgus,'' and that "their demands as delivered 
in writing were extremely just/' ^ It is they, he 
said, who " laid open that dangerous truth which 
is implanted in every heart, that mankind are all 
born equal; saying that if Popes had ti^ated 
princes like theu^ subjects, princes had treated the 
common people like beasts/' ^ 

The "manifesto'' above referred to is given in 
full by Gieseler in his EGclesiadicol History* 

^ Introduction to Bistory pf Xineteentli Century, p. 30. 
^^Vorks (London, 1701). vol. IV.. p. 70. Uh,, p. 73. 
* (Edinburgh, 1855), vol. Y., p. 347-9. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 137 

and is worth referring to, alike as an eloquent 
statement of their notion of liberty, and a proof 
of their avouching of the word of God as the 
sole source of that notion and guaranty of their 
claim. The third article reads as follows: 
^^ Hitherto it has been the custom for men to 
hold us as their own property, which is a pitiable 
case, considering that Christ has delivered and 
redeemed us with his precious blood shed for us, 
the peasant as much as the prince. Accordingly, 
it is consistent with Scripture that we should be 
free, and wish to be so. Not that we wish to be 
absolutely free, and under no authority ; but we 
take it for granted that you will either willingly 
release us from serfage, or prove to us from the 
gospel that we are serfs.^^ As a "conclusion 
and final resolution ^^ of the whole twelve articles 
they say, " If one or more of the articles, herein 
set forth, is not in agreement with the word of 
God, we will recede therefrom, if it be made 
plain to us on Scriptural grounds . . . Likewise 
if more articles of complaint be truly discovered 
from Scripture, we will also reserve the right of 
resolving upon these.^^ Here is unmistakably 
set forth the claim that in the word of God is 
to be found that intelligible, infallible, supreme, 
and exclusive revelation of fundamental law, 
which every man has a right for himself to read 



138 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

and comprehend^ and to wliicli every man must 
at his peril implicitly submit. And here is 
doubtless that radical idea in which tlie pene- 
trating eye of Xeander saw^ beneath a rough 
husk of crudity and fanaticism in the earlv 
Anabaptists, the ^^ mustard seed^' of a near 
future. 

Crudity and fanaticism enough there clearly 
was, registered in that company; filling the fore- 
ground of history' ^vith violence, monstrosity, and 
noisy incoherencies. But we must remember 
that almost all vital forces are awkward in 
their first forms. The swiftest bird first props 
itself on ungainly legs, and climbs with tremb- 
ling; and unsteady wins; to reach its arrow flio^ht. 
The very criterion of beo;innino: life in the bio- 
plasmic mass, ac<K)rding to Dr. Beale, is the 
shapelessness of its uneasy heavings.^ Xor is it 
to be forgotten that the times were themselves 
chaotic. The old was broken, or breaking, the 
new was not yet fashioned. The Reformation 
flood was sweeping on with impetuous majesty, 
and ran into a gulf as yet unmeasured. Up 
against the cataract rose a spray of enthusiasm, 
formless, Protean, tempestuous. Nevertheless, 
looking steadily upon the confused scene, we 
may discern, hanging within, distinct, symmetri- 
'^Life, Force, and Matter (Loudon, 1870), p. 38. 



THE MOULD OF BOGlllINE. 139 

cal, abiding^ a ^^bow in the cloud." The very- 
harbinger that Neander saw of the coming time, 
when every man should be free for himself to 
know and for himself to obey the one law — 
when the unfettered soul should be entrusted 
fully with the unfettered word. 

THE ANABAPTISTS AND THIS DEMAND. 

It remains to inquire how directly the Ana- 
baptist movement was itself associated with 
this idea; whether such association was logical, 
or merely incidental ; and if logical, whether as 
cause or effect. For this two or three pre- 
liminary suggestions may prepare the way. 

First, It will be noticed that the question of 
immersion was not as yet involved. The reason 
is obvious. The practice of pouring and sprink- 
ling, though prevalent in some quarters and to 
some extent, had a place by sufferance only, and 
not by positive injunction. The formulary 
drawn up by Calvin at Geneva was, says the 
learned Dr. Wall, "the first in the world that 
prescribes affusion absolutely.'^ ^ 

Second. The real point of controversy was not 
the alleged rebaptizing itself, as the taunting name 
transmitted to history would seem to imply ; but 
the repudiation of infant baptism, commonly 

^ History of Infant Baptism^ p. 718. 



140 THE MOULD OF BOOT BINE. 

expressed in that overt form. It was primarily 
a revolt against an existing order^ rather than 
the fashioning of a new one. Dr. Wall more 
accurately terms them Antipedobaptists. 

Third, Pro]3erly there was no specific Ana- 
baptist sect as such. Groups most widely 
separated and discordant in doctrine and spirit 
were miscellaneously covered by that epithet. 
The communistic anarchist, the rationalistic So- 
cinian, the mystic Illuminist, and the sober Men- 
nonite, though differing at almost every other 
point, agreed in their contempt for this institu- 
tion, and were bound together under a common 
name thereby. Indeed, so wide was the sweep 
of the stream spanned by that comprehensive 
title, and so impetuous was the cmTcnt, that it 
may fairly be said to have drawn in the great 
body of those who sought further to reform 
the Reformation. Even some of its original 
leaders, including Melancthon, (Ecolampadius, 
and Zwingle, barely escaped its tremendous 
power, as they distinctly confess.^ 

Now, it is scarcely conceivable that mere 
accident should have rallied so many and so 
discordant groups of combatants to a single and 
so narrow a point of resistance. Nor does it 

^ Cf. Neandefs History of Dogmas, vol. II., p, 688. 
Planck, History of Protestant Theology vol. II., p. 47. 



THE MOULD OF BOOT BINE. 141 

seem credible that these heterogeneous multi- 
tudes should, through mere caprice or self-will, 
have contested even to the gallows and the block 
so trivial a concession as the harmless submission 
of their children to the priest's hands for bap- 
tism. It is manifest that they saw, or thought 
they saw, some more tremendous weight of con- 
sequence hanging on that pivot. 

Inevitably thus the great issues of church 
history in doctrine and life have grouped abput 
and hidden in this marvellous symbolic ordi- 
nance. As in the time of John, the great re- 
former, so now, it is the "axe laid unto the'' very 
"root of the trees." "The Reformation had 
scarcely boasted an existence of five years," says 
Mohler (beginning his account of the "funda- 
mental principle of the Anabaptists" in his 
work on Symbolism), " when from the midst of 
its adherents men arose who declared it to be 
insufficient." He proceeds to urge their con- 
sistency in that claim, since as a necessary result 
of "Luther's maxims and writings," "nothing 
is easier than to account for their rejection of 
infant baptism." 

EEFORMERS OF THE REFORMATION. 

The pregnant idea of Luther's career was 
embodied in his famous ultimatum at the Diet 



142 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

of "Worms^ refusing to retract anything but 
what could be shown ^^from reason and Scrip- 
ture^ and not from authority^ to be erroneous.'^ ^ 

For many centuries the Bishops of Eome had 
claimed infallibility, and to doubt their dogmatic 
utterances or disobey their edicts was not only to 
be a heretic but a rebel. Under that usurped 
authority they had gagged reason, subordinated 
the Scripture to tradition, and substituted the 
mailed hand for the winning voice of the gospel. 
All this w^as embodied in infant baptism, in 
which reason was insulted by the dogma of bap- 
tismal regeneration and vicarious faith. Scripture 
perverted or ignored in behalf of tradition, and 
voluntary consent of the baptized made impos- 
sible. 

In his revolt, therefore, against force, tradition, 
and unreason, Luther was bound in consistency 
to sweep away this final bulwark behind which 
they were all entrenched. But magnificent as 
was his onset, he halted too soon, and began to 
" build again the things he had destroyed.^^ "As 
the founder of a new Church,^^ says Roscoe,^ "he 
appears in a very different light.^^ "In one 
instance he effected his purpose by strenuously 
insisting on the right of private judgment in 

iRoscoe, Leo X, vol. IL, pp. 105, 226. 
2 /6., vol. II., pp. 235, 236. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 143 

matters of faith, whilst in the other he succeeded 
by laying down new doctrines to which he ex- 
pected that all those who espoused his cause 
should submit/^ When arguments from Scripture 
failed, he resorted to more violent measures. 

When Carlstadt refused to accept his fantastic 
theory of consubstantiation, Luther saw in that, 
^^as well as in the denial of infant baptism/' to 
use Gieseler's words/ ^^the sole result of the 
pride of reason advancing beyond Scripture ; 
and he resisted both doctrines as entirely analo- 
gous fanaticisms/' and banished him accordingly. 
Insulted reason thereupon, being denied any- 
thing, seized everything, lifted the banner of 
revolt, and marched away under Socinus into 
the Unitarian apostasy. 

Luther had staked all upon the supreme au- 
thority of the written word, and the universal 
"liberty of prophesying.'' But he forthwith 
assumed, not only the arbitrary interpretation of 
that word, but the right to impose an observance 
confessedly unwarranted by it; and he forbade 
the intrusion of all other interpreters except 
they could "work miracles" or show "priestly 
orders"^ in the apostolic succession as their cre- 
dentials. Naturally enough he found many as 

* Ecclesiastical History, vol. Y., p. 340. 
^Mohler's Symbolism, p. 369. 



144 TEE MOULD OF LOGTBINE. 

sensitive to the claim of monkish^ as he had 
been of Papal^ infallibility; and some, vaunt- 
ing excess of liberty, renounced together the 
mastery of Pope, monk, and Scripture alike; 
trusting to the divine sanction of that "inner 
light ^^ which they left to the Quakers as their 
chief heritage, and which has cast some warm 
gleams along the line of Moravian and Metho- 
dist descent. 

Again, Luther having summoned mankind 
to a revolt against all depotism, temporal or 
spiritual, had ended, as Gervinus says, in simply 
transferring "the divine right of investiture 
from the Pope to the secular magistrate ^^:^ thus 
making the struggle to be, "not for the liberty 
of conscience of the simple individual of tne 
middle class, but for the right of princes to make 
reforms in their own lands, and to eflPect im- 
provements in the Church as a benefit conferred 
by them on the people/' "Luther had been 
successful,'^ says Voltaire,^ "in stirring up the 
princes against the Pope and Bishops; Miinzer 
stirred up the peasants against them all/' No 
wonder, therefore, when they were summoned 
by the civil magistrate, under penalty of death, 
to renounce reason and abandon Scripture, in 

^ Intro, to Hist, of the Nineteenth Century, p. 32. 
2 Works, vol. lY., p. 73. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 145 

behalf of an ordinance for which they found no 
sanction in either, that they retorted that ^4n- 
fant baptism is of the Pope and the devil/' 
Nor that one group of peasantry raised their 
grotesque and savage war-cry, ^^ Forge Pin-ke- 
pank on Nimrod's anvil/' and like the defrauded 
Samson, blind and crazed, bowed themselves be- 
tween the pillars to bring doAvn the whole civil 
structure — the lawful progenitors of all com- 
munistic enthusiasts thenceforth. 

But these volcanic outbursts, though so con- 
spicuous, were but sporadic hints of a compact 
and steady flame blazing deeper down. There 
were "yet seven thousand" who would not bow 
down the knee either to the Papal, the Lutheran, 
or the Libertine Baal. They saw in the unintel- 
ligent, unconsenting babe, thrust by magisterial 
force into the priest's hand, the very image of 
man himself under the terrible hand of Rome : 
coming thence spiritually — as was fitly symbolized 
physically in the inquisition torture of the "iron 
virgin" — with pierced eye-balls, mangled flesh, 
and crushed bones. But they saw also that rea- 
son and faith are harmonious and trustworthy 
only when yoked indissolubly to Scripture. For 
liberty is but perfect obedience to perfect laAv — 
and only "the law of the Lord is perfect." Re- 
sisting alike the intrusion of all forms of human 

K 



146 THE MOULD OF DOGTBINE. 

authority — civil, ecclesiastical, or social — into that 
realm where ^^ Christ alone is King and Law- 
giver/^ they insisted that baptism, which he has 
made the outer badge of discipleship, belongs to 
faith alone-^that faith rests on freedom — freedom 
on intelligence-— and that God^s word, read and 
comprehended, alone is the "truth that makes 
free/^ Thus — ^though successively accounted 
rebels, heretics, and obstructives, as the sceptre of 
usm^ped authority has passed from State to 
Church, and from Church to nineteenth century 
"Catholicity,^' — -they "continue unto this day 
witnessing both to small and great, saying none 
other things than'' our Lord himself taught 
them when he said, " If a man love me, he will 
keep my wordsJ^ 



I 



CHAPTER IX. 

BAPTISM AND LOYALTY— DEBASING THE 
STANDARDS. 

IN a volume of Theological Essays, published 
a few years since, Mr. R. H. Hutton offers 
these suggestive comments upon the history and 
policy of the Romish Church. "Rome alone 
has presented her theology to the world in a 

thoroughly institutional form Romanism 

was a vast organization almost before it was a dis- 
tinct faith. Rome did not so much incarnate her 
dogmas in her ritual as distill her dogmas out of 
her ritual.^^^ Again, "Rome in general acted 
first and thought afterwards. She distilled her 
Christian theory out of her Christian institu- 
tions. And what is the rule by which she has 
tested her institutions, and therefore, in the last 
result, her dogmas? It is by their adaptation to 
the mind of the universal church. Neither 
ancient nor modern Rome has had any strong 
love for truth as truth. . . . The defiuition of 
divine truth coming nearest to the conception 

1 (Philadelphia, 1876), p. 336. 

147 



148 THE MOULD OF D OCT BINE, 

which seems to be formed of it by the Romish 
Church would be ^^hat body of theoretic as- 
sumptions which would be needed completely 
to justify, on intellectual grounds, all those in- 
stitutions, special and general, by which practi- 
cally she has been enabled to win hearts and 
guide nations/^ ^ That is to say, she recognized 
the necessity of positive institutions as the em- 
bodiment of authority and basis of a visible 
organism, and that such institutions will in- 
evitably ^^distiir^ doctrine and mould faith. 
She thus saw that she must build upon a rock, 
and that the outline of the rock would shape 
the outline of the building. But instead of 
taking ^^ Christ'^ for ^^that rock,'^ or even Peter, 
as she claimed to do, laying her walls along the 
line of the divine ordinances as devised by the 
one, and set in place by the other, she took herself 
for a foundation; and reshaping the ordinances 
to the measure of human credulity, passion, and 
self-interest, built thereon a temple of supersti- 
tion and self-will, wherein Christ may speak 
only in an unknown tongue or the dumb show 
of the mass, and appear only dead on the 
crucifix, or superfluous in the niche, or in the 
picture on the wall. 

Recognizing even to an extreme the value of 

1 Theological Essays^ pp. 345, 346. 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 149 

"catholicity^^ as a test of truth, Mr. Hutton 
insists that "in order that the social power and 
influence of an institution may be any sign of 
its divine origin, the common cry must go up 
spontaneously, and without ulterior aim, out of 
the popular heart ^^: not so "if it be only the 
result of combination, instead of its cause. If 
you can explain it in the vulgar method by 
merely pointing to a common and visible self- 
interest, or even to a clearly recognized class of 
common aims and purposes, then there is no 
sacred mystery in this uplifting of a common 
voice. . . . ^ Great is Diana of the Ephesians^ 
was no vox populi, but merely a vox ai^genta- 
riorum — a voice of silversmiths. It was an offi- 
cial cry, the clamor of consentient self-interests, 
issuing from the artificial mouth-pieces of esprit 
de corps J^^ Tried by this canon the "catho- 
licity^^ of Romanism breaks up into a partisan- 
ship, none the less real, because of the length 
of its antiquity and the strength of its majority. 

And what other alleged "catholicity^^ will fare 
better, when offered as a criterion of truth? 
For where is the man that does not belong to 
some " craft ^^ that is, or at times seems to be, 
"in danger,'^ and to whom is not some vox 
argentariorum a vernacular? The acme of 

^ Theological Essays, p. 347, 



150 THE MOULD OF DOGTBINE. 

achievemeDt in vital mechanics is balanced per- 
pendicularity in man, and even he cannot get 
forward without leaning. So long as "winds of 
doctrine'' blow, we shall be likely to bend be- 
fore them or against them. Even without their 
disturbing pressure, a sudden mental apocalypse 
might surprise many of us by showing that we 
are reeling hea\dly under the fumes of preju- 
dice, or lolling against the pillars of custom. 
The determining of truth by the averaging of 
opinions, therefore, would be a process as unre- 
liable as the sifting out a vertical line by com- 
puting the net direction of a wilderness of slant- 
ing ones. And even more fatuous would it be 
to submit a standard once found to revision by 
such a process. Woe to the man who attempts 
to improve the perpendicularity of the plumb- 
line by taking counsel of "the blowing clover 
and the falling rain.'' Such a plumb-line is the 
revealed word of the Divine Christ, and such an 
improvement upon its perfectness Rome has 
essayed by the consent of tradition, the vote of 
Councils, and the decree of Popes. Infallibility 
having been successively assumed for these, falli- 
bility by obvious inference fell upon all else; 
and the practice of Rome became the mould by 
which worship, duty, and doctrine must be 
shaped, and into conformity with which the 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 151 

meaning and even the words of Scripture must 
be refashioned. 



A REMNANT OF ROME. 

Can the Eomish spirit have been so subtle and 
SO tenacious as imperceptibly to have penetrated 
in any degree into and lingered in the atmos- 
phere of Protestantism? The spectroscopistg 
have amazed us by finding the three-millionth of 
a milligramme of sodium in a dust speck, where 
the most delicate chemical tests had failed to re- 
veal its presence.^ Perhaps we may err in fancy- 
ing we have a spiritual spectroscope so fine, or at 
least that we know equally well how to use it. 
But wherever we find an ecclesiastical practice or 
dogma virtually erected into a standard, to the 
pattern of which formularies are progressively 
readjusted, (such readjustment gravitating toward 
the gradual extrusion of associated Scriptural 
language or idea as incongruous), and to the exi- 
gencies of which the canons of interpretation 
and translation must be made to bend, we may 
fairly suspect a residual element from Rome. 
That the practice of sprinkling, in lieu of im- 
mersion, under the name of baptism, applied to 
infants as the rule and to adults only exception- 

* Schellen^s Spectrum Analysis (New York, 1872), p. 5. 



152 IHE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

ally, has been made such a standard, and with 
such results, it is sought here to show. 

The testimony of the late Dean Stanley, in his 
before-mentioned Nineteenth Century article on 
Baptism (afterward substantially embodied in his 
book on Christian Institutions), is worthy of 
citation in this connection. The pinmitive bap- 
tism he distinctly affirms iva^ immersion. "On 
philological grounds it is quite correct to trans- 
late John the Baptist by John the Immerser.^^ ^ 
"Baptism by sprinkling was rejected by the whole 
ancient Church (except in the rare case of death- 
beds or extreme necessity) as no baptism at all.'^ ^ 
It was of adults, "The liturgical service of 
baptism was framed entirely for full-grown con- 
verts, and is only by considerable adaptation ap- 
plied to the case of infants.'^ ^ It was intelligent 
and voluntary, for it was " of their own delibe- 
rate choice'^ — it was 'Hhe special sacrament,^^ 
"the pledge,^^ the "oath of allegiance.^^ ^ Of 
this primitive normal type he sets out to find 
what he significantly calls the "residue.^' In- 
stead of a baptism which is the immersion of an 
adult believer, he finds a baptism which is not 
immersion, not of an adult, and not of a believer. 
Suppose that on an apothecary^s shelf is a jar 

^ Nineteenth Century Magazine, vol. YI., p. 698. 
^Ih. 3/2?, p 599, *i5.,p. 692. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 153 

labeled ^^pure water.'' Now pure water is ^^color- 
less, transparent, and without taste or smell.'' 
But in the jar he finds only a viscid drop which 
is not colorless, not transparent, and not without 
taste or smell. He will surely conclude that the 
only ^^ residue" is the label, which to avoid con- 
fusion might better be removed. At least he 
will take it as an odd suggestion that the muddy 
globule be made the standard of " pure water," 
and Webster's definition re-adjusted thereto. But 
Dean Stanley says the primitive ordinance was 
one ^^to which no existing ritual of any Euro- 
pean Church offers any likeness" — "the change 
from immersion to sprinkling has set aside the 
larger part of the apostolic language, and has 
altered the very meaning of the word." ^ By 
way of testing the trustworthiness of these con- 
clusions, it may be profitable to study some of 
the reflex influences of the present practice on — 

FIRST THE REVISION OF FORMULARIES. 

The successive changes made by the English 
Church, and by the American Methodist Church 
advancing thereon, will afford a convenient field 
of inquiry. For impartial authority Wall's 
well-known Histoi-y of Infant Baptisftn and 

* Nineteenth Century Magazine, vol. YI., p. 698. 



154 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 



Sherman's History of the Methodist Discipline^ 
will be relied upon. ^ 

Up to 1530^ according to Wall, the formu- 
laries for public baptism universally enjoined 
dipping, without mentioning pouring or sprink- 
ling. The Sarum Manual of that year pre- 
scribed dipping alone. In the Common Prayer 
Booh printed in 1549, it is added, ^4f the child 
be weak, it shall suffice to pour water upon it,'' 
etc.^ Subsequently, he says, "the inclination of 
the people, backed with these authorities (that 
of Dr. "VVhitaker, Calvin, and others), carried the 
practice against the rubric, which still required 
dipping, except in cases of weakness."^ In 
revising the Prayer Book at the Restoration (the 
Puritan Directory which had displaced it in 
1644 having declared it "not only lawful, but 
most expedient" to use pouring or sprinkling), 
the Church "did not think fit to forego their 
maxim in favor of dipping '' ; but being equally 
unwilling to ignore ihe drift of custom and 
popular taste, they so modified the rubric as to 
concede in fact what they refused in word. For 
by requiring the child to be dipped only when 
the godfather shall certify that it "may well 
endure it," they removed the presumption of 

1 Wall, before cited. (See p. 34.) Sherman (N. Y., '74), 

2 Wall, pp. 715, 716. 3 /^.^ p. 713. 



1 



THE MOULD Oi DOCTRINE. 155 

robustness by which alone dipping had been 
preserved as the rule. Thenceforth, as Wall re- 
gretfully remarks, ^^they never do certify the 
priests/^ and "the priests seldom ask the ques- 
tion," and dipping has wholly wasted away in 
the English Church. ^ 

The American Methodist Episcopal Church, 
formally organized in 1784, in its original 
Discipline provides for "the choice either of 
immersion or sprinkling'^ (to Avhich is added in 
1786 "or pouring.'')*^ Persons baptized in 
infancy and having now scruples are, if they 
persist after argument, to be baptized "by im- 
mersion or sprinkling,'' as they desire.^ This 
"Anabaptist" heresy lingered in the Discipline 
until 1868. The ritual order of baptism, 
abridged from that of the English Church, 
originally required the minister, taking the 
child into his hands, "to dip it in water or 
sprinkle it therewith" — in the midst of which 
was inserted in 1786 "or pour water upon it" 
— and finally in 1792 the whole clause was 
erased, and in its stead inserted "sprinkle or 
pour water upon it, or if desired, immerse it 
in water."* In the original formulary ape re- 
tained, from the English, allusions to the case 

1 Wall, pp. 750, 721. 2 Sherman, p. 120. ^ 75 
* 76., p. 306. 



15C THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

of Noah and of Israel led through the sea, as 
^^jSguring this holy baptism'^ — to the baptism 
of Jesus ^^in the river Jordan" — to the burial 
of the ^^old Adam" and the raising up of the 
^^new man in him" — to ^^ spiritual regeneration" 
and the " resurrection from the dead " — all which 
have successively, but with singular uniformity, 
been singled out for expurgation.^ Substantially, 
therefore, the ritual, by purging itself of all 
malapropos Scripture, has so far refashioned 
itself to the '' broken mould," that regeneration 
and resurrection are effectively excluded from 
its symbolism; a result which, as before men- 
tioned, has been reached by the British Wes- 
leyans in a still more categorical form. And 
this notwithstanding John Wesley's comment 
on Eom. 6 : 4, viz. : '' Buried with him — allud- 
ing to the ancient manner of baptizing by im- 
mersion," and the entry in his Journal of '' Feb. 
21, 1736, Mary Welch, aged eleven days, was 
baptized according to the custom of the first 
church, and the rule of the Church of England, 
by immersion." ^ 

It may be added, that while Calvin was un- 
equivocal in admitting that "the word baptize 
means immerse," ^ and the Westminster Confession 

^ Sherman, p. 300, seq. 

2 Journal (London, 1872), vol. I., p. 25. 

5 Commentary on Ads, 8 : 38. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 157 

declared only that ^^ dipping" was ^^not neces- 
sary/^ the Presbyterian Church of to-day in its 
^'Directory for Worsliip^^ has gone on actually 
to forbid immersion^ for it enjoins "pouring or 
sprinkling/^ "without adding any other cere- 
mony." ^ The unique attitude thus assumed by 
Presbyterianism in practice and ritual may sug- 
gest one element at least for the explanation 
of another phenomenon equally unique. Any 
student of the later Commentaries will be struck 
with the fact^ that while nearly all scholars of 
the English and Continental Churches have 
recognized frankly and without reserve the con- 
clusiveness of the verdict of philology, exegesis, 
and history, in favor of immersion as the primi- 
tive baptism, there has been a conspicuous sensi- 
tiveness and reluctance in that direction on the 
part of the Scotch writers, followed and intensi- 
fied along the same lines on this side of the sea. 
Among the Episcopalians and Lutherans, where 
the union of Church and State and the con- 
tinuance of prelatic functions make extreme 
notions of ecclesiastical authority still tolerable; 
or where, on the other side, rationalism has 
supplanted the supremacy of Scripture, there is 
no sense of discomfort in confessing the distinct- 

* Appendix to Psalms and HymnSj Presbyterian 
Boa-d, Philadelphia, p. 42. 



158 TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

ness of the command, avoiding its present claims 
by pleading release through subsequent author- 
ity. But in non-prelatic Churches, and where 
latitudinarianism is not yet dominant, this re- 
source fails. It will be in vain there to forbid 
w^hat the Scripture is acknowledged to prescribe. 
To have reconstructed the ritual so as to coincide 
with the practice will be in vain, except the 
Scripture can also be reconstructed so as to har- 
monize with both. Hence the emergency that 
issues in — 

SECOND THE WARPING OF INTERPRETATION. 

" The Scriptures,^^ says Bungener, '' were writ- 
ten by common men to be understood by common 
men.^^ ^ ^^The more any interpretation bears the 
mark of simplicity, and it appears as if it ought 
to have struck the reader before, the more likely 
is it to be true," says Ernesti. "It is better to 
run all lengths with Scripture truth in a natural 
and open manner," BengeP adds, "than to shift 
and twist and accommodate." ^^The sense of 
Scripture is one, certain and simple," breaks in 
iMelancthon,^ and is ever^^where to be ascertained 
in accordance with the principles of grammar 

1 History of Council of Trent (N. Y., 1855), p. 96. 

2 Life hy Burck, p. 257. 

* Elements of Rhetoric^ II. 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 159 

and human disccurse/^ And finally Luther: 
"We must not make God's word mean what we 
wish; we must not bend it, but allow it to bend 
us; and give it the honor of being better than 
w^e could make it; so that we must let it stand/' 
But the fatal facility of exegesis when under 
stress is proverbial^ and has been often justly 
satirized. Mohammed, it was said, prohibited 
the eating of a certain part of the swine. But 
the Mussulman, having first assumed uncertainty 
as to the part forbidden, argued against the 
probability of the intended application of the 
prohibition to each part successively, until he 
had gone over the whole. The result Cowper 
sums up : 

Thus, conscience freed from every clog, 
Mohammedans eat up the hog. i 

Dean Swift's famous study of the dexterously 
interpreted will scarifies the same foible. The 
retention of the demise was made dependent 
among other things on the heir's refraining from 
the wearing of "silver fringe." But that style 
of decoration having come in fiishion, it was 
opportunely found that the term "silver" was 
"allegorical," and that "fringe" (being perhaps 
a "generic" word) might mean "broomstick." 

1 Jacox, Secular Annot. (London, 1871), vol. II. p. 49. 



160 lEE MOULD OF DOCTRISE. 

The objection that a prohibition to wear an 
" allegorical broomstick ^^ was unmeaning, w.is 
overruled as ^4rreverent and hypercritical."^ 
This sarcasm is not lower than the strange 
abuses of Scriptui^e which provoked it. Of 
such a character was the sermon justifying the 
persecution of heretics, from the words ^^Rise, 
Peter, slay and eat." The defence of seven as 
the number of the sacraments on the ground 
that mysterion is the Greek word for sacrament, 
and that seven is the mystic number; and the 
proof that the mass is a true oblation because 
Paul speaks of the ^4able of the Lord," w^hile 
^^ table" means ^^ altar," and an "altar" implies 
"sacrifice," are of like character.^ Dumoulin 
justly says, that to depend on such proof-texts is 
"like warming oneself at the moon." Even 
the great Augustine, to save unbroken the 
doctrine that baptism is essential to salvation, 
maintains that the dying thief was baptized 
w^ith blood from the Saviour's wounded side, 
or else had been baptized before his conviction. 

SOME ILLUSTRATIVE INSTANCES. 

MattheAv (3: 6) described the people as bap- 
tized "in Jordan." Dr. Whedon^ (in loco) says: 

1 Tale of a Tvb, Works, (Edin, 1814) vol. II., p. 88. 
^BuDgener, Council of Trent, pp, 152, 337, 338. 

2 Commentary on Matthew (New York, 1870), p. 47. 



TEE MOULD OF DOC THINE. 161 

"The Jordan had several banks within banks, 
so that a person could be in the Jordan on dry 
ground.'^ This curious geographical informa- 
tion, fortified by a citation fi^om Dr. Thomson, 
is conveyed for the purpose of adding a caveat 
against what, it seems to be implied, would be a 
a natural inference from the language itself. 
"This expression, 4n Jordan,' only indicates, 
therefore, wliei^e the rite was performed : it in no 
way indicates the modeJ^ This adroit effort at 
the evisceration of the Evangelist's meaning — 
suggested long before, by the Avay, by Ewing, 
an antagonist of Dr. Carson — ^ has been since 
treated somewhat harshly by the Revisers, who 
make the text now read " in the river Jordan," 
as the parallel passage in Mark already did. 
But waiving that, consider how fantastic a theory 
is here put forth in the name of interpretation, 
to divest the words of their natural meaning, 
obvious, but inconvenient for the interpreter. 
By the same process, having moved 1800 years 
forward, try the statement that a man was 
"drowned in the Mississippi.'' "Mississippi" 
may readily mean Mississippi Valley, especially 
as that is often called the Mississippi "bottom" 
— the Avord "drowned" means "strangled," and 
"strangled" is a "generic" word including 
1 See Baptism (Philadelphia, 1860), p. 125. 



162 THE MOULD OF BOCTRINE. 

^^ hanged;'^ and since no man would go into the 
water to be hanged, the legitimate rendering of 
the passage would be that he was ^^ hanged in 
the Mississippi Valley/' One of the pioneers 
and among the ablest exponents of this school 
of exegesis was Dr. Paulus, who sought to prove 
by the same process, also with an ulterior though 
different motive, that when our Lord is said to 
have walked on the Sea of Galilee, he only 
w^alked in fact along its shores. ^ 

One of the expressions cited most widely and 
confidently by theologians and liturgies as de- 
scribing baptism, and with special emphasis by 
some as justifying infant baptism, and excluding 
immersion, is that used by Paul in Titus 3: 5, 
^^the washing of regeneration.'^ But those who 
thus apply it must maintain: 1. Iimiia^sion, For 
the Greek word (loutron) takes in the whole 
body) not a part.^ 2. Baptisvial regeneration. 
Since this is, in stlch a case, the literal force of 
the terms used. On the other hand, that this 
was not the natural interpretation of the words, 
but reflected upon them by a perverted ordinance, 
and a false doctrine craving justification, is man- 
ifest: 1. From the grammatic parallelism — 

^ Cliristlieb, Modern Doubt, p. 346 
2 ^^LouOy' to bathe, to wash, but only a person or the 
whole hod^." — Robinson, Gr. Lex. of JS^e^v Testament. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 163 

^^ washing of regeneration^ and renewing of the 
Holy Ghost ^' — as the Holy Ghost renews, so re- 
generation washes. One-half cannot be inverted 
without inverting both, which would shatter the 
sense. 2. From the force of the figure. Regen- 
eration may wash, for life cleanses ] death only is 
pollution. "Being born again by the word of 
God/' says Peter, — " that he might cleanse it (the 
church) with the washing of water by the word," 
says Paul — "Now are ye clean through the 
word," says our Lord. On the other hand, wash- 
ing can never bring life. No washing can change 
the "leopard's spots" and the "sow's" filth into 
the purity of a "new creature." ^ 

Another passage strangely distorted and even 
reversed in emphasis by enforced subjection to a 
theory, is Paul's joint reference to baptism and 
circumcision in Col. 2: 11, 12. Here, true to 
the instinct above mentioned, the Scotch Presby- 
terian, Dr. Eadie, says, " We are not prepared to 
admit of any allusion to that form (immersion) 
in the clause before us." " The apostle looks on 
baptism and circumcision as being closely con- 
nected, the spiritual blessing symbolized by both 
being of a similar nature."^ Baptism having 
been assumed to be a drop applied at a single 

^ Cf. Jacox, Secular Annotations, vol. II., p. 48. 

^ Commentary on C olossiaii s [ho\\(\or\^ 1856), p. 153. 



164 TEE MOULD B DOGTEINE. 

point of the body^ and to be the exact counter- 
part of circumcision, how natural and how com- 
fortable is it to read the apostle as here confirm- 
ing both ideas. But this is wholly to dislocate 
his meaning. The comparison is one of con- 
trast, not of resemblance. It is, says Lightfoot, ^ 
the "contrast of literal circumcision of pari of 
the flesh, with putting oif the whole in baptism.^^ 
The word used to describe the contrasted whole- 
ness of baptism is a double compound to that 
end : " a word,'^ he adds, " as strong as it is rare 
to express the idea of completeness, both in 
energy of action and extent of operation.' ^ ^ 
" The eye, the ear, the hands, tlie feet, all have 
been baptized with the divine baptism,^^ says 
Perowne. ^ Hence follows the exhortation in 
ch. 3: 5, to realize what has been symbolized, 
"Deaden therefore your members,^' etc. The 
same emphasis on symbolized entireness occurs 
in Gal. 3 : 27 ; for as Baur remarks on that pas- 
sage, ^ " he who puts on a garment goes alto- 
gether inside it,^^ and so there is an " end of the 
exterior identity of the believer." This, he 

1 Commentary on Colossians (London, 1880), p. 184 

2 /&., pp. 184, 189. 

^ Hidsean Lectures, 1868, on Lmmortality (New York, 
1870), p. 119. 

4 F. 0. Baur, Life of Paid (London, 1875), vol. IL, 
p. 177. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 165 

says, ^^graphically represents" burial into Christ's 
death in "immersion/' 

Finally, the " baptism of fire/' referred to by 
John in Matt. 3: 11, has been most grotesquely 
put under the bellows to forge a shaft against 
immersion. '^This text/' Dr. Whedon says/ "is 
the fundamental passage for showing from the 
very nature of the rite what is the true method 

of performing baptism The baptism of the 

Holy Spirit was not by immersion, but affusion. 
. . . the tongues of fire sat on them." He adds 
the grim Boeotian hint, for those "whom it may 
concern/' that "baptismal fire is affusion; the fire 
of Hell is immersion." Dr. James Strong, of 
the same Church, on the other hand, insists that 
the " baptismal fire" here alluded to is the "fire 
of Hell/' being an "overw^helming" with "con- 
suming vengeance." ^ 

That the Pentecostal allusion is imposed upon 
and not suggested by the expression in question is 
manifest. The contextual use of "fire" not only 
does not hint but really forbids it, as has been 
often pointed out. Nor is there anything in the 
Pentecostal scene to suggest the idea of pouring 
or sprinkling, more than of immersion, in the 
"appearing" of "tongues parting asunder" that 

* Commentary on Matthew. 

2 Harmony of the Gospels (New York, 1854), p. 30. 



166 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 

^^sat ou each of them." In fact, the attempt to 
determme the ^^true mode of performing bap- 
tism" from the single featm^es of that occasion 
will land the inventors of that scheme at an unde- 
sired port. To identify the baptism of the Spirit 
with the ^^'ushing of a mighty wind/^ the "being 
filled with the Holy Spirit/^ and the "speak- 
ing" with "tongues/^ would teach re-baptism, 
which all Christendom repudiates : for these were 
repeated upon the same subjects.^ One solitary 
circumstance remains that never recurred to 
them: "it filled all the house where they were 
sitting." They were, in the words of Professor 
Plumptre, of King's College, "plunged as it 
were in the creative and informing Spirit which 
was the source of life and holiness and wisdom." ^ 
The confusion introduced into this whole sub- 
ject by a back-handed exegesis might be greatly 
relieved by remembering that the "baptism of 
the Spirit" and the "gifts of the Spirit" are 
distinct. The priest was anointed after he was 
washed: the Spirit came on our Lord after 
baptism, and Andrew thereupon spoke of him 
as "the Christ": and the cliarisms, whether of 
tongues or other, are nowhere confused with 
baptism in the New Testament. 

J Ads 4.: 31. 

2 ''Handy Commentary'' (London. 1879), edited by 
Bp. EUicott, on Matt. 3 : 11; cf. Acts 1 : 5. 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTBIXE. 167 

These examples may suffice to show how 
imperious^ how insidious, and how pernicious is 
the power of a mutilated ordinance. There was 
once a ^^ shekel of the sanctuary/^ the standard 
and test of all others. How certainly would the 
holder of a coin clipped or wasted, but which he 
claimed to be the true shekel, desii'e to bring the 
sanctuary standard to conformity with his own. 
Speaking of the good and learned men who 
persist that en hudati must be rendered with 
watery Dr. Campbell,^ of Aberdeen, an extraordi- 
nary Presbyterian, says, ^^The true partisan 
always inclines to correct the diction of the Spirit 
by that oj the party, "^^ ''1l am sorrj' to observe," 
he adds (p. 23; ^'that the Popish translators from 
the Vulgate have shown greater reverence for 
the style of that version than the generality of 
Protestant translators have shown for that of the 
Original. For in this the Latin is not more 
explicit than the Greek." 

^ Four Gospels, on Matthew 3 : 11. 



CHAPTER X. 

BAPTISM AND LOYALTY— THE ULTIMATE ISSUE, 

FAREAR begins his History of Free Thought 
by describing it as "the struggle of the 
human mind to free itself from the authority of 
the Christian faith/^ ^ As if responding to con- 
firm this view Strauss writes in his New Life of 
Jesus: "In the person of Jesus no supernatur- 
alism shall be allowed to remain : nothing which 
shall press upon the souls of men with the 
leaden weight of arbitrary, insG7mtable authority/^ ^ 
The chief priests and elders had challenged our 
Lord himself long before with the words "By 
whsit authority doest thou these things?"^ 

It becomes us earnestly to ask — What is this 
"authority'' which seems to provoke to instinc- 
tive and perhaps unconscious revolt? — ^lest we 
ourselves may have come in contact with it, and 
" haply be found even to fight against God/' If 
there be any embodiment of it, we may fairly 

1 Bampton Lectures, 1862 (New York, 1863), p. 1. 

2 Cited in Farrar's Witness of History to Christ (Lon- 
don, 1871), p. 51. 

3 Matt. 21 : 23. 

168 



4 



THE MOULD OF DOCIUINE, 169 

regard as such that last consummate expression 
of his kingly will^ which the risen Redeemer 
gave to his disciples as the organic statute of his 
kingdom. As rendered in the Revised Version 
the passage reads thus : "All authority is given 
unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye there- 
f re, and make disciples of all the nations, bap- 
tizing them into the name of the Father and of 
the Son and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them 
to observe all things whatsoever I commanded 
you.^^ The first and last of these injunctions, 
viz. : to " make disciples,'^ and to " teach them to 
observe'^ all "things eommanded,^^ have been 
universally regarded as of literal obligation. 
But the mid-lying clause, although it embodies 
one of those very "things commanded,^^ and the 
only one thus exalted into isolated eminence, is 
not only treated as belonging to an inferior 
category, but the proposition to " observe ^^ it as 
of positive significance like the rest, is in many 
quarters treated with an impatience verging to- 
ward indignation or contempt. 

It is totally immaterial, we hear continually, 
whether "baptize" means "immerse" or not, 
since precise conformity is in any case unne- 
cessary. And this because, 

1 . Christianity, being a spiritual, not a formal 
religion, looks to the intent, and lays no emphasis 



170 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

on the outward act. Insistence on immersion, 
says Dr. Schaff in his Chwrch History^ is a 
^^ pedantic Jewish literalism.'^ ^ 

2. The verdict of Christendom has settled the 
question. " The overwhelming majority of Prot- 
estant Christians, to say nothing of Roman 
Catholics, are unbaptized/' if immersion only is 
baptism. Such is the broadside poured into the 
Baptist stronghold by Dr. Rice.^ 

3. Our more refined civilization revolts at so 
coarse a form. It is, to cite Dean Stanley, 
^^ peculiarly unsuitable to the tastes, the conve- 
nience and the feelings of the countries of the 
North and West." The substitution of sprink- 
ling he regards as ^^a striking example of the 
triumph of common sense and convenience over 
the bondage of form and custom.''^ 

In the Gospel of Matthew (chapters 21 and 
22) are recorded in immediate succession three of 
of our Lord's parables, apparently uttered on a 
single occasion, which precisely anticipate these] 
modern suggestions, one by one. They are fullJ 
of profound significance in this connection, of ' 
which only a hint can here be given. They are : 

1 (New York, 1860), vol. L, p. 123. 

2 Mode of Baptism, p. 36. 

^ Nineteenth Centura/ Magazine, vol. YI., p. 698. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 171 

FIEST, THE PARABLE OF THE DISOBEDIENT SON. 

A father commanded his two sons to work in 
the vineyard. The first said " I will not/^ but 
afterwards went. The second said "I will," 
but never went. The bystanders, being appealed 
to, decided instantly that the first alone "did the 
will of his father." Now the "doing the 
Father's will" is the one thing on which our 
Lord lays most stress as essential in the Chris- 
tian life.^ He here plainly teaches that when 
that will is embodied in an explicit command, 
there is no obedience, whatever the intent, short 
of doing the specific thing commanded, in a 
"pedantically literal" way. Had the father 
given the son a parable to be puzzled over, a 
doctrine to be meditated on, or even a statement 
of fact to be received, these addressing them- 
selves to the intellect might have demanded 
delay, and involved embarrassment in appre- 
hension and mental adjustment. But a com- 
mand is addressed to the will alone: and no 
response is possible but surrender or refusal, 
and these take form in outward act or omission 
to act. All law is specifically a rule of conduct. 
Only where, as in the old common law, that rule 
must be traced through a tangle of bewildering 

1 Matt 7:21; 12 : 50 ; Mark 3 : 35 ; John 4 : 34 ; 5 : 30. 



172 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

precedents and general maxims, can imperfect 
conformity be in any degree atoned for by good 
intent. The explicit statute cuts off such a plea. 
Failure to keep that has no excuse, except it can 
show the statute itself ambiguous or impracti- 
cable. There is no trouble in distinguishing the 
common law realm of the parabolic, doctrinal, 
and ethical in Scripture — which are given to 
stimulate research, reflection, and inference — 
from the explicit statutes of the Lord, which 
need only to be obeyed. Concerning these he 
says, "Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not 
the things which I say?^^ 

That so palpable a principle as is here empha- 
sized should ever be overlooked is due in part, 
perhaps, to a latent and dangerous ambiguity of 
thought lying in the word " authority ^^ itself. 
Thiers and the first Napoleon were both 
"authors'^: the one of the History of the Em- 
pire, the other of the Empire itself. The 
"authority" of the one was doctrinal — in the 
realm of opinion only; of the other magisterial 
— in the realm of law\^ 

It is quite possible to pass insidiously from 
the one sphere to the other, and under the garb 
of an interpreter to assume the functions of a 

1 Cf. Gladstone's Gleanings, (Scribner, New York), 
vol. III., p. 139. 



THE MOULD OF DOCriilSE. 173 

lawgiver. John Calvin^ in his Institutes^ spoke 
with the authority of a logician; in his comments 
on the Romans with that of an exegete; in his 
translation of bo^ptizo^ with that of a linguist, 
appealing to reason and the Scripture itself for 
his vindication ; but when, having admitted the 
command to immerse to be distinct and unquali- 
fied, he proceeded to offer dispensation from 
literal obedience by decreeing that ^^ dipping is 
not necessary,^^ ^ he assumed the functions of a 
Pope, and spoke with no authority at all, for he 
appealed to nothing. Dr. Hodge, of Princeton, 
decided that baptism with sand, mud, wine, oil, 
or milk, though in the name of the Trinity, and 
with perfect intent, is invalid: because 'Svater 
is essential to baptism, and as far as ^ the matter ' 
is concerned nothing else is.'^^ It is as though 
where the law required an official signature for 
the authentication of a particular document, a 
judge should hold that a blotch from an over- 
turned inkpot would be sufficient; since ^^ ink is 
essential to a signature, and as far as ^ the matter' 
is concerned nothing else is." Our Lord com- 
manded a specific act to be performed — whatever 

^ Commentary/ on Acts (Edinburgh, 1846), (on ch. 
8 : 38), vol. I., p. 364. 

2 Jb,j cf. Institutes, Book IV., cap. 15, p. 19. 

3 On Church Polity (New York, 1878), p. 198. 



174 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

is conditional to that act is of course implied; 
but to teach that the thing implied is essential, 
and the thing commanded non-essential, is not to 
interpret, but to legislate. 

It is curious, indeed, that those who are so 
averse to literalness in form should be so pain- 
fully precise as to literalness in element. Is 
water in itself more ^^spirituaP' than milk or 
T\'ine? And is it really venial, in a religion 
which ^^ regards only the intent,^' to change the 
form through caprice, but mortal to change the 
elements through necessity, as in the case of the 
desert-bound disciple, whose sand baptism was 
pronounced invalid? In "this specific case it was 
Rome who fii^t taught us to appeal from Christ 
to the Pope to learn what is really essential in 
the divine word.^ 

"Go work,^^ said the father. The words are 
verbs, and describe acts. Thev are not fio^urative 
or paradoxical. The son who refused literal 
obedience disobeyed. "Go baptize," said our 
Lord. The word "baptize,'^ says the learned 
preacher, means "immerse'^ — "I baptize thee," 
he repeats, moistening the forehead with a drop. 
" They say, and do not," said our Lord of the 
Pharisees. 

1 On Church Polity (New York, 1878), p. 198. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 175 

SECOND, THE PARABLE OF THE REBELLIOUS 

TENANTS. 

Never was there a more "catholic consent ^^ 
than that of the husbandmen who had hired the 
vineyard. The verdict that they need not pay for 
it, but on the contrary might usurp the inheritance 
itself, was unanimous, and vigorously acted on 
against all claimant messengers. But it is plainly 
In'nted that there are some questions not deter- 
minable by a majority vote. Obligation arises 
out of a state of facts, and cannot be extinguished 
by any process short of payment, or abolition of 
these facts. It may be very true that if the 
debtor " owes ten thousand talents and has not 
to pay,'' he may "be sold, etc., that payment may 
be made'' :^ but that unhappy consequence would 
be quite irrelevant as disproving the existence of 
the debt. It is painful enough to think of the 
"overwhelming majority of Protestant Chris- 
tians" as " unbaptized," and so it is to think of 
the overwhelming majority of the people in 
Christian lands as not Christians at all : either 
statement would bring offence, but neither pain 
nor indignation settles a question of fact. The 
toothache does not extinguish itself by agonizing 
us. The obligation to be baptized arises, not 

^ Matthexvl^: 25. 



176 THE MOULD OF BOCTniNE. 

out of the consent of Christendom^ but out of 
the command of Christ. Whether any man has 
obeyed the command is to be determined^ not by 
asking what conclusion would be most comfort- 
able for him or most flattering to the majority, 
but rather what was the exact thing required, 
and has that thing been done. The debt due to 
the landlord was neither disproved nor paid by 
resentment against the messengers. 

THIRD, THE PARABLE OF THE COXTEMPTUOUS 
SUBJECTS. 

The citizens who had tacitly accepted the in- 
vitation to the king's feast did not generally find 
it ^^ convenient '^ to come when summoned. One 
went, but in a garment of his own devising, 
seeing the ^^ wedding garment '^ was unsuited to 
his ^Hastes.'' There is a significant inverse 
gradation in these parables. On the one side 
they ascend — the father, the landlord, the king: 
on the other they descend — an arbitrary com- 
mand, an equitable claim, a courteous invitation. 
But while no specific punishment is attributed to 
the sluggish son, the presumptuous guest meets 
the bitterest fate of all. The lesson is obvious. 
Evil as is the neglect of the father's authority, 
still worse is an insult to the king's majesty. 
And that insult they offer who ^^make light of'^ 



< 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 177 

his message, or prefer their own patterns as more 
decorous than his. 

Notwithstanding Dean Stanley's statement/ it 
is very difficult to believe that the change from 
immersion to sprinkling was due at all to change 
in climate, custom, or taste. Palestine itself 
was not strictly tropical. Our Lord speaks of a 
^^ cloak'' as well as a "coat."^ Ritter says, ^Hhe 
cold north winds of winter make furs very com- 
fortable in Jerusalem."^ ^^The waters of the 
Jordan are then (in winter and early spring) so 
cold, as they flow from the snows of Lebanon, 
that even Arabs will not bathe." So writes 
Geikie,'' citing Sepp and others. Frozen Russia 
has clung to immersion. Subtropical Italy has 
abandoned it. The change since the days of 
Queen Elizabeth, who was immersed,^ has not 
coincided with a roughening English climate, or 
a gradual abandonment of ^^ bathing" (if that 
has any bearing). They plainly delude them- 
selves, therefore, who imagine that so flimsy a 
pretext could ever have been the original and 

^Nineteenth Century Magazine, vol. VT., p. 698. 

« Matthew, 5 : 40. 

3 Geography of Palestine, (New York, 1866), vol. IV., 
p. 182. 

*Life of Christ, (New York, Appleton, 1880), vol. 
I., p. 577, 

« Wall, History of Inf. Bap., pp. 712, 717. 
M 



-178 THE MOULD OF DOCTBINE. 

avowed basis of so serious a departure^ however 
it may be urged in defence of an established 
custom. The case of Italy, as contrasted with 
that of Eussia, shows that the alleged " triumph 
of common sense and convenience'^ is in fact 
the triumph of Papal assumption. The devout 
Presbyterian does not in fact refer \^ his arbi- 
trary ^4aste'' as the ultimate criterion, in decid- 
ing what is valid baptism, but to the Church 
formulary — and that rests on the ^^ authority ^^ 
of John Calvin. 

It is nevertheless a serious matter to ^^make 
light of any feature of our Lord's regulations, 
even by a frivolous or disparaging word. The 
beggars were welcome at the king's feast, for 
they were not too ^^ refined" to wear the garments 
which the king himself had chosen : but the man 
who sought to air his '^ Christian liberty " in a 
garment of newer and superior cut, got himself 
and the rebuke that met him pinned fast on the 
enduring page, for the leisurely study of all sub- 
sequent adventurers who incline to exalt aesthe- 
tics above revelation. 

Immediately succeding these parables in Mat- 
thew's narrative is an incident which crowns 
their teaching; reminding us that events were as 
fluent as pambles to the Divine Teacher's will.^ 

1 Matthew 22 : 15—22. 



I 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 179 

The ^^ entangling " question — the coin from Caes- 
ar's "mould'' — the pungent answer, "Render 
therefore to Csesar the things which are Caesar's ; 
and unto God the things that are God's" — all 
these are familiar. They teach us to recognize 
discriminate spheres, and to render "tribute to 
whom tribute is due" in each. Tacitus spealvs 
of soldiers who preferred "to discuss, rather than 
to obey, their leader's commands," thus virtually 
assuming leadership themselves. Caesar's coin 
bore the impress of his majesty in his "image 
and superscription:" to alter that, to clip the 
coin itself, or to withhold it when claimed as 
tribute, would be treason against the empire. 
But if unquestioning loyalty in the slenderest 
trifle was due to a human ruler, how much more 
to the Divine. Caesar might utter laws super- 
fluous, ephemeral, or otherwise needing to be 
repaired or to be adjusted: this is only to say 
that he was human.^ Not so of him who 
^^ knows the end from the beginning," and whose 
command is to last unchanged and unrepealed to 
the end of the world. To attempt remodeling 
that to meet changes impliedly unforeseen or 
neglected, is to revise the judgment of Omnis- 
cience and " charge God with folly." 

* Of. G. C. Lewis, on Methods of Observation, etc., in 
Politics (London, 1852), vol. L, pp. 470, 472. 



180 THE MOULD OF DOCTEiyE. 
BAPTISM THE TEST OF LOYALTY. 

And now^ lest this discussion should seem to 
be a mere grouping of accidental coincidences 
and their perversion to an alien end, it may be 
well to call attention to the circumstance that 
occasioned the parables cited, and furnished their 
theme. The transition will be easy, from the 
contrasted claims of God and Caesar, just men- 
tioned, to the contrasted authority of baptism, 
regarded respectively as ^*from heaven or of 
men.^' (Ch. 21 : 25!) 

The chief priests and elders had questioned 
our Lord^s authorit}^. He flashed theu' lantern- 
light back into their own faces, and down into 
their hearts, with a question which, though seem- 
ingly remote, was all too close for them.^ He 
picketed them in fact between the two horns of 
a dilemma, from one of which thev must dano;le, 
unless they could slip out between. ^^ The bap- 
tism of John, whence was it? from heaven or 
of men?^^ They had superciliously treated it 
as human, "being not baptized of him^':^ but 
they had not dared to deny that it was divine, 
"for they feared the people.^^ They vaulted 
therefore through a ready loophole, saying, " We 

1 See Dr. Parker's admirable chapter on Christ as an 
Interlocutor, Ecce Deus, (Boston, 1868), p. 207, seq. 

2 Luke 7 : 30. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 181 

cannot telP^ and were pursued by the athletic 
parables in question. 

It is noticeable that our Lord here makes bap- 
tism the test, as it is in itself the expression, of 
wholeness of loyalty. ^^His (John's) idea of 
repentance exceeded the outward requirements of 
the Mosaic law/' writes Dr. Lange, "as much as 
his rite of immersion that of sprinkling.'^ ^ It 
was "to fulfil all righteousness/' "laying down 
his life of himself"^ symbolically, as he after- 
wards did literally, that Christ was baptized in 
Jordan. "Ye became obedient from the heart to 
that form (or pattern) of teaching Avhereunto ye 
were delivered'':^ so Paul sums up the whole- 
ness and absoluteness of the life-surrender em- 
bodied in the sacramental type. 

The Pharisee's answer may imply contempt 
for the question as trivial, or real uncertainty. 
If the latter, it was, as shown by our Lord's 
further words, only a convenient and inexcusable 
uncertainity. " None deny there is a God, but 
those for whom it maketh that there were no 
God," Lord Bacon pithily remarks.* Having 
repudiated John's baptism, it was needful some- 
how to discredit it. The plea of impracticability 

iLange, Matthew (Ed. Scliaff, 1869,) p. 69. 
2 Mattheiu 3:15; John 10 : 18. 
^Remans 6 : 17. {Canterbury Revision). 
4 Whately's Bacon, p, 155. 



182 IHE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

being obviously unavailable, that of uncertainty 
alone remained possible. But they were flour- 
ishing a deadlier weapon than they knew. 

A recent periodical contained a stirring sermon 
fi'om a Methodist preacher on this question to 
the Pharisees, concerning the origin of John^s 
baptism.^ The theme deduced from it was, 
"The Inspiration of Moses.'' Its relation to 
the text will not at once blaze on the reader, 
but its statement reveals a true homiletic in- 
stinct. The baptism of John and the message 
of Moses proceed from the same source, appeal 
to like credentials and demand lil^e reverent 
submission. AVilful or disingenuous dealing 
with the one will inevitably entail like treat- 
ment of the other. Therefore, Christ will not 
"commit himself to them ;'' for, as he intimates 
in his parable, they who have not dealt fairly 
with the " servants'' will not "reverence the 
Son." 2 

A LINGUISTIC AGNOSTICISM. 

If the validity of baptism be really inde- 
pendent of mode, so that proving the word to 
mean "immerse" would be entirely irrelevant 
and immaterial, as is constantly affirmed, it is 
plain that so translating the word would be 

^ Chautauqua AssemUy Herald, Aug., 1882. 
^Matthew 21: 38, 39. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTEINE. 183 

equally harmless. Id that case it is singular 
that Bishop Titcomb should have been so "em- 
barrassed^^ by such translation^ and that the 
Bible Society should have decided it impossible 
^^consistently to use and circulate'' a Bible 
infected by it.^ The sensitiveness thus mani- 
fested reveals the conscious untrustworthiness of 
the theory advanced. " The bed is shorter than 
that a man can stretch himself on it.'' The 
meaning of the word is of consequence. It 
mus^ be "embarrassing" to explain even to the 
stupidest Burman that Christ has commanded his 
followers to be ''immersed/^ that he has said, "if 
a man love me he will keep my wordsy^ and that 
therefore it is his duty to be — sprinkled. There 
is a more convenient way — it is, when he asks 
what Christ means by being baptized, to say, 
" We cannot tell." This linguistic agnosticism 
is the inevitably adjacent burrow into which t.- e 
argument vanishes if hotly pressed. The mean- 
ing of the word is only immaterial when men 
do not insist on knowing it, but impossible 
when they do. Indeed, it is argued that the 
meaning is uncertain because it is immaterial, 
and also immaterial because it is uncertain. 

It is possible here only by fragmentary illus- 
tration to show how the exigency thus arishig 

I Bible Society Record, June 15, 1882. 



184 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

presses scholarship awry, and "blinds the eyes 
of the wise/^ The mention of a name so dis- 
tinguished and revered as that of Dr. Schaffi, in 
this connection, affords occasion to say, what it 
is hoped might in any case be charitably believed, 
that the citations made in these papers have been 
made purposely from men in various denomina- 
tions high in attainments and in the esteem of 
the Christian world. It would be absurd to 
suppose that the inconsistent or erroneous teach- 
ings attributed to them are meant to impugn 
their abilities or motives; on the contrary, the 
more clear-sighted and unimpeachably conscien- 
tious they are reckoned, the stronger is the case 
here sought to be made against the witchery of 
a perverted ordinance. 

The difference in the ecclesiastic atmosphere 
of German Lutheranism and Presbyterianism 
has been already alluded to. Dr. Schaff (then 
in the Lutheran Seminary at Mercersburg), pub- 
lished in 1858 his History of the Christian 
Church, In 1882, (then being in the Presby- 
terian Seminary in the city of jN'ew York), he 
published a revised edition of the first volume. 
In this revision among many changes occur 
these significant ones. The statement of 1858, 
that "the usual form of baptism was immersion, 
is plam/^^ from divers circumstances, becomes 

1 Vol I., p. 122. 



TEE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 185 

now only that it is "inferred/^ ^ The old refer- 
ence to " later Hellenistic usage" ^ as allowing to 
baptism "sometimes the wider sense of washing 
and cleansing/' now becomes an avowal that 
"Hellenistic iisage'^^at large did the like. A 
serious change : for while the former statement 
could not affect the question in hand^ the latter 
clearly might. It would be interesting to know 
what secret archives have recently disgorged tes- 
timony to reverse the overwhelming verdict of 
scholarship since Schneckenburger's day/ to 
which Dr. Schaff assented in 1858, that prose- 
lyte baptism was unknown in Christ's day. 
Again, in 1869, Dr. Schaff published Lange's 
Commentary on Matthew, annotated by himself. 
It is there stated without note of qualification 
or dissent, as to John's baptism, that " This bap- 
tism was administered by immersion, and not by 
sprinkling."^ Ten years later, in 1879, Dr. 
Schaff published another Commentary on Mat- 
thew, prepared by himself with the help of Dr. 
Riddell. Speaking of the same baptism, he now 

1 Yol. I., p. 468. 2 p. 125. 3 p. 469. 

* The whole matter is thus summed up by Fairbairn: 
" So far as the direct evidence goes, the very utmost that 
can he Haul is, that indications appear of Jewish prose- 
lyte-baptism as an existing practice during the fourth 
century of the Christian era." — Hermeneatics (Phila- 
delphia, 18f)9), p. 305. 

^ Lange, Mattheiv, p. 68. 



186 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

says, "The subjects went into the river, and 
were either immersed by John, or water was 
'poured on them. The Greek verb baptize is a 
technical term for a symbolical washing.'^ ^ If 
this means that it has now become a technical 
term, it is irrelevant. If it means that it was 
so when our. Lord used it, the world waits for 
proof. Most extraordinary tasks have been 
attempted in that direction. Dr. Krauth has 
even undertaken to prove that the modern tech- 
nical sense of taufen is in fact its ancient sense, 
and that Luther never used it as meaning to dip, 
although Luther himself says he did. ^ 

One of the most extraordinary books on the 
"technical sense ^' is that of Dr. Armstrong, 
whose whole argument is distinctly "limited to 
baptizo used as a religious or sacred terni,''^ ^ It is, 
he says, "always a generic term, having no 
reference to mode : and hence to translate it by 

1 Scribiier's Popular Commentary, 1879, vol. I., p. 42. 
Cf. also, on use of Greek preposition en, Lange on Mat- 
thew 3 : 11, with Schaff and Riddell on same verses, and 
also on Mark 1 : 8. 

2 Krauth, Conservative Reformation in Theology 
(Philadelphia, 1871), p. 536. Cf. Schaff-Herzog, Ency- 
clopoedia of Religious Knowledge (New York. 1882). 
*' Luther sided with the im^nersionists, and described the 
baptismal act as an immersion, and derived taiife (G-er- 
man for baptism), from tief (deep), because what one 
baptized, he sank tief in the water." — p. 210. 

3 Sacraments of the New Testament, (J^e\Y York, 1880), 
p. 12. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 187 

dip, immerse, sprinkle, or pour, will be to mis- 
translate the word of GodJ'^ His main au- 
thority for asserting the occurrence of sucli terms 
in the New Testament is Dr. Campbell, from 
whom he quotes in extenso — substantially to the 
effect that '^ classical use is not only sometimes 
unavailing, but may even mislead/^ ^ Dr. Camp- 
bell is correctly cited thus far : but he supplies 
further information on this subject, which is, very 
abstemiously, refused, viz. : '' The word baptizein, 
both in sacred authors and in classical, signifies 
to dip J to plunge, to immerse, and was rendered by 
TertuUian, the oldest of the Latin Fathers, 
tingere, the term used for dyeing cloth, whicli 
was by immersion,'^^^ The same Dr. Campbell 
reminds those who insist that it is impossible 
definitely to translate a word because it has secon- 
dary meanings, that by the same rule all lan- 
guage would become hopelessly indefinite. ^^The 
explanation of a simple sentence will appear like 
the solution of a riddle.^^ '' The verb to make in 
our language has, according to Johnson, sixty- 
six meanings, to put eighty, and to take one hun- 
dred and thirty-four.^^ ^ Every institution ouglit 
to be suspected, which for its own self-justifica- 

^ Sacraments of the New Testament (New York, 1880), 
p. 1. 2/^.^ p. 5. 

3 The Four Gospels (Aberdeen, 1854), vol. IV., p. 24 
(ou Matthew 3: 11). * Jb., vol. I., p. 97. 



188 THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 

tion begets an effoii: to weaken confidence in the 
certaintj^ of the ^vord of God. Milman in his 
Essays says, ^^The first to impugn the authen- 
ticity of Scripture, leading Astruc, Eichhorn, 
Paulus, and Strauss, was the Jesuit father Simon; 
who did it to assert the authority of the Church/^ * 
To reach tliat end Simon contended that "the 
greater part of the Hebrew words are equivocal, 
and that their signification is entirely uncertain/^ 
and that the "Hebrew lexicons commonly contain 
nothing but uncertain conjecture/'^ "Modern 
neology deals with Christ's words just as Rome 
does/' says Archer Butler, "treating them as 
imperfect; showing that the philosophy of 
Romanism and that of Rationalism are funda- 
mentally one."^ 

THE WITNESSING WOED. 

Akin to the exigency which tempts to obscure, 
is that which tempts to alter, the T\Titten word. 
The libeities which Rome has taken in this 
direction are familiar to all. In the Index of 
Pope Clement VIII. it is declared proper "to 
expunge even the words of sacred Scripture 
which may be impiously turned to a profane 

1 (London, 1870 1, p. 302: cf, p. 305. 

2 Campbell, The Four Gospels, vol. I. pp. 81-3. 

s Letters on Eomanisra (Cambridge, 1858). p. 28. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE, 189 

use."^ In Cardinal Wiseman's Essays we are 
informed that " the prenomen ' Jesus/ of Barab- 
bas, has from motives of reverence been dropped 
from the text/^ 

Dr. Jenner^ physician to Edward VI., pub- 
lished a Drama in which he represents the mass 
as praying thus : 

** Because in the Bible I cannot be found 
The heretics would bury me under ground. 
I pray you heartily, if it be possible, 
To get me a place in the great Bible." 

The Council of Trent exalted the Vulgate above 
the original Greek and Hebrew, as the " authen- 
tic'' Scripture.^ Eadie says, the British and 
Foreign Bible Society did the same thing for the 
Elzevir text of 1624^ (and by keeping verses in 
it now known to be spurious, ^^ circulated a 
forgery in the divine name."^) The American 
Bible Society has erected the common English 
Version into a like canon ; requiring all its 
issues to be "conformed in the principles of their 
translation" to it."* It has gone further; it has 
declared that version authentic only as the word 
"baptism" is taken in a particular sense: it 
being impossible " consistently to use and circu- 

^ Cited in Letters on Romanism, p. 27. 

2 Bungener, Council of Trent, p. 90. 

3 History English Bible, vol. II., p. 347, note. 
^ See Rules of Translation. 



190 THE MOULD OF D OCT BINE. 

late'^ any translation in which the equivalent for 
^^ baptize ^^ is understood among the people as 
meaning ^' immerse/^ ^ It follows logically that 
if the autograph manuscripts of the Evangelists 
should be discovered to-day, tliey must be de- 
clared "deficient in catholicity/^ and could not 
be "consistently used and circulated ^^ among the 
Greeks (where the word baptizo is universally 
understood to mean " immerse ^^)^ until revised 
by inserting rantizo or cheo, in order to conform 
them to the "principles" of the English version. 
It is a good omen that there is so much anxiety 
to explain away the definite meaning of this 
critical word. It reveals an increasing popular 
anxiety and determination to hiow its meaning. 
Prelacy is an anachronism — indiflPerentism does 
not quiet the conscience — the issue narrows to the 
word itself. " What is written in the law ? how 
readest thou?'^ The " mould '^ has been broken, 
but the witnessing word — kept by the providence 

* Bzhle Society Record, June 15, 1882. 

2Cf. Stanley, Eastern Church (London, 1861), p. 17. 
" The humblest peasant who reads his Septuagint or 
Greek Testament in his own mother tongue, on the hills 
of Boeotia, may proudly feel that he has an access to the 
original words of divine truth which the Pope and Car- 
dinal reach by a barbarous and imperfect translation." 
"There can be no question that the original form of 
baptism — the very meaning of the word — was complete 
immersion in the deep baptismal waters. . . To this 
form the Eastern Church rigidly still adheres." — p. 34. 



THE MOULD OF DOCTRINE. 191 

and grace of God through superstitious jealousy 
of the letter, fossilization of language and 
palimpsest — remains intact. To it the final 
appeal must be had. In it the true outlines of 
the ^^ mould ^' are traceable, and by it they may 
be restored. " It is not he that hath good gold 
that is afraid to bring it to the touchstone/^ said 
King Jameses translators. He only will b^ 
justified in the end who shall be found in sim- 
plicity and integrity, '^Holding fast the 

FAITHFUL WOKD.'^ 



THE END. 



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